


The Longest Distance

by hollyanneg



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: (kind of), Actor Adam Parrish, Angst with a Happy Ending, Fox Way is eternal but idk why Persephone lives in 1912, M/M, Noah is somehow the mechanic?, POV Alternating, Ronan works in a library, Slow Burn, Time Travel, bear with me, usual warning for Adam's dad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-09 09:51:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20851490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollyanneg/pseuds/hollyanneg
Summary: Ronan meets a stranger who claims to already know him. Weeks later he sees a picture of the same man-- but the picture is a hundred years old. All the clues seem to point to Ronan becoming a time traveler. He just has to figure out how and why...





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is partially based on the movie Somewhere in Time, because I’ve always wanted the chance to rewrite the ending of that movie. I’ve chosen not to deal with period-typical homophobia (or any homophobia) in this fic.

Ronan’s most interesting day at the library started out like any other. He shelved some books. He helped an old lady set up an email account. He talked to a small child with big glasses about dinosaurs for a solid-half hour. He shelved some more books.

He’d been working this job for about six months. His brother Declan had said that Ronan needed something to do, and Ronan would have been fundamentally opposed to it (as he was to all of Declan’s ideas) if he hadn’t been secretly rather bored. 

He’d been obliged to move to DC because his dreaming had gotten a little out of hand, which had forced him to admit that living alone on an isolated farm was possibly, slightly dangerous. Living with his brothers in an urban area was also dangerous, but at least if he was seriously wounded by any monsters he’d created, someone would know about it.

He was a little less reluctant to move to DC because Gansey lived there. Gansey was a history student at Georgetown and Ronan’s best friend, always dragging him on arcane adventures and keeping him safe from himself. 

Gansey had found him the library job. It had sounded a little ridiculous at first—Ronan in a library—but it wasn’t so bad. Pretty easy work, pretty predictable. The librarians liked him because he could intimidate anyone who broke library rules, and—more importantly—he could find absolutely anything in their databases faster than they could. This was a skill he’d developed after coming to work there. He was not overly fond of technology. When he had to look things up for someone, he learned to do it as quickly as possible so that he could move on. Apparently this was impressive.

The most interesting day was a Tuesday, and it didn’t become interesting until about noon. A boy walked through the doors. Ronan didn’t notice everyone who came in—because there were a lot—but he noticed this boy because he was beautiful, and because he was dressed like he’d stepped out of an old photograph, and because he seemed a little lost. Until he turned and saw Ronan and his eyes lit up. He rushed over to where Ronan stood at the circulation desk and grabbed both of Ronan’s hands.

“Here you are!” said the boy, smiling widely. “I was so afraid I wouldn’t be able to find you.”

Ronan did not know what to say, but he was pretty willing to keep holding the boy’s hands.

The boy looked at him in this elated way, like he’d just received the best gift of his life, or like Ronan had come back from the dead or something. “Hi,” he said, shaking his head a little. “I don’t know how long it’s been for you, but god, I’ve missed you so much. Ronan—” a pleased little laugh— “are you surprised? You look so shocked.”

“Uh,” said Ronan eloquently. “I don’t—”

“Know what to say? Me neither.” The boy gripped Ronan’s hands harder and leaned in close. “It’s all right. I’m here now. I’ll stay, if you’ll have me. Just say we can work it out, please.” He said this like it was the most important thing in the world to him. 

He wasn’t smiling anymore. He was wide-eyed and earnest-looking. Ronan was busy cataloguing his face. Deep-set blue eyes, high cheekbones, tanned skin, sandy hair. He was tall and slim and maybe about 20. Ronan had never seen him before. He would definitely remember if he had. It was an unusual face, of the type he liked to look at.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Ronan. He tried to sound less gruff than usual, because the boy seemed to care so much about… whatever was going on here.

The boy pulled back and let go of Ronan’s hands, which was really a shame. “You don’t?”

“No.”

“Have you seen me before? Do you know my name?” the boy asked urgently.

“No.”

This was when Ronan finally understood what _crestfallen_ meant, by the way the boy’s chest fell, his whole body slumping. He went silent and looked away, his face twisting like he might cry. Quieter than before, he said, “This is the wrong time. I’d forgotten…” He brushed at his eyes. “I’ll have to try again.” When he turned to Ronan again, he was teary-eyed, but his expression had turned analytical, questioning. “You’re _sure_ you don’t know me?” 

“I’m sure,” said Ronan. “Sorry.” He wasn’t fond of apologizing—and whatever this was, he was pretty sure he wasn’t responsible—but the sorry seemed necessary.

The boy continued to stare at him in that unnerving, evaluating way. He nodded and said, “I got it wrong, then.” He pressed something into Ronan’s hand. “Keep this,” he said, “so you can give it to me later.” His eyes roved Ronan’s face. “I’ll see you soon, I hope.”

He was out the door before Ronan could react.

The object in his hand was a pocket watch. Gold, antique. The kind of thing Gansey would love. The kind of thing that fit perfectly with the mystery-boy’s creased pants and high collar and tweed vest. On the inside was an engraving. _Tempus edax rerum._ Time, devourer of all things.

Ronan slipped it into his pocket, and when he came home that day, he placed it carefully on the table beside his bed. He committed the boy’s face to memory. This was a mystery he wanted to solve.

Two and a half months later, he hadn’t come any closer to solving the mystery, though he’d thought about it a lot. His best hypothesis was that the boy was crazy, but this wasn’t a very creative hypothesis. He’d hoped the boy might come to the library again, but he hadn’t, not even on Ronan’s off-days (a few of his coworkers had witnessed The Incident and were on the lookout).

The pocket watch remained on his bedside table. Gansey had guessed it was at least a hundred years old.

Ronan didn’t get another clue until he went to The Island Hotel—and then all the clues came at once.

Gansey’s father always seemed to be looking for new business ventures, and recently he’d branched into the hospitality industry, buying a few hotels, including one on Chincoteague Island, Virginia. He’d spent a few months renovating it, and just before it reopened, Gansey invited Ronan to go down and see it.

Ronan was less than enthused. The island was isolated—there couldn’t be much to do there—and hanging around an empty hotel sounded creepy. Besides, Gansey was going to be busy, helping to interview potential new staff members. But Gansey promised wild horses and open beaches. His girlfriend Blue—Ronan’s other best friend—was coming along, so Ronan finally agreed.

There was a bit of a fight about whether they were going to take Gansey’s car, which continually broke down, or Ronan’s, which never did. Ronan didn’t understand why this was even a conversation. Blue put an end to the discussion. “We’ll take the Suburban,” she said. “It’s environmentally unfriendly, but I can look the other way for this one trip.” So they took the Gansey family’s Suburban.

It was about a three-hour drive, across the bay and down through Maryland. They wouldn’t let Ronan pick any of the music, which made it a lot less fun.

They drove over a bit of water that Gansey called “the Queen Sound Channel.” 

Ronan said, “Only you would know that,” and Blue said, “How can it be a sound _and_ a channel?”

The island was less remote and empty than Ronan had expected based on the whole wild horses thing. They drove past a lot of old, too-neat houses, and then some newer, too-neat houses, which were even worse. There were a lot of pine trees and swampy grassland areas, which was par for the course anywhere on the Virginia coast.

Gansey’s dad’s hotel was a little bit outside of town. It was long, but not tall—three stories and a basement. It had been freshly painted white with red shutters. There were long, wide porches all around the hotel, on every floor. They looked out over the ocean.

Gansey said the hotel was about 130 years old, but inside, you couldn’t tell. Everything was modern, sleek, state-of-the art. All the walls were a cool white. It reminded Ronan of Declan’s house, so he wasn’t a fan. Blue agreed. “What is the point,” she asked Gansey, “of buying a historic hotel and making it look brand-new? Why didn’t they keep any of the antique elements?”

Gansey shrugged, looking around like he didn’t love it, either. “This is what my dad had in mind, I guess.” He led them up and down various hallways, taking it all in. The only interesting part was the kitchen, because it had food in it.

“By the way,” said Gansey, “he wants to change the name, so help me think of suggestions.”

“It’s been called The Island Hotel for 130 years, and he’s going to change it now?” Blue asked.

“He thinks it’s not a very interesting name—”

They continued to argue about that for a minute. Ronan was already bored.

Ronan had been correct—staying in an empty hotel was creepy, no matter how updated it was. Besides the three of them, there were only maybe four or five employees in a hotel meant for hundreds of guests. That night, it was eerily quiet. Ronan had his own room, and he couldn’t sleep, as usual. When he started seeing sinister shapes in the shadows, he considered knocking on Gansey’s door and begging to sleep with him and Blue. But then it occurred to him that they might be _doing things._ So Ronan went out the back door of his room, onto the balcony, and listened to the waves crash on the shore down below until he felt a little saner.

The next day, Gansey had interviews, so Ronan and Blue went walking around town. Town had a lot more hotels and B&Bs and summer houses for rent. There were little restaurants and coffee shops. Stores selling souvenirs. Stores selling fish. They ate pizza and ice cream, and Blue bought some postcards and a keychain. They passed a very small amusement park, and Blue said, “We’ll go there another day. We don’t want to see everything right away.”

There wasn’t much else _to_ see. Gansey had promised to take them out to the wildlife refuge where the horses lived on a day that he wasn’t busy.

Idly, they wandered into an art gallery. It was mostly full of paintings of the island itself—pretty, dull paintings that belonged on the walls of all those hotels and rental houses. Ronan gravitated towards a corner full of photographs instead. These weren’t for sale. A plaque said: _Former location of the Chincoteague Playhouse._ So this building had been a theater, and the pictures were of the plays that had been performed there. A lot of Shakespeare and Gilbert and Sullivan. On the opposite wall were pictures of actors who’d performed at the theater. He’d never heard of most of them. But then one picture caught his attention, and he couldn’t look away.

It was in sepia, but he didn’t need color to recognize that face. Deep-set eyes, high cheekbones—it was the boy from the library. Beneath the picture, another plaque said _Adam Parrish, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1912._

Ronan went cold all over. He’d seen that boy—unmistakably alive and barely older than in the picture—in the present day. How could that be? His brain struggled to make sense of it, but… The old-fashioned clothes, the hundred-year-old pocket watch, the words _this is the wrong time,_ and most of all, the fact that he’d expected Ronan to already know him. Adam Parrish had to be a time-traveler.

Ronan stood and stared at the picture, mesmerized, for a few minutes before Blue came over and said, “Spaced out, huh? Yeah, this place is kind of boring. Let’s go.”

He let Blue drag him out of the gallery, but he had a feeling he’d be back. Out on the street, he said, “I need to go to the library.”

“Don’t you spend enough time in libraries already?” she asked. She looked at him carefully, and he figured she could tell that his mind was somewhere else. “Okay,” she said slowly. “Library. Yeah. I could use something to read.” She slid Ronan’s phone out of his pocket and started typing away. “Reception’s spotty here,” she commented. “But it looks like the library is that way.” She pointed behind them.

Ronan’s first thought, actually, was that he needed to go to _his_ library, where he’d learned how to find information about anything at all as quickly as possible. Since that wasn’t an option, though, the Chincoteague library would have to do. They walked about ten minutes to get there. It was right on the shore. Ronan gritted his teeth and asked the librarian if they had any books on local history. She found him a couple. Blue went wandering around as he flipped through the books. “Why do you want to know about the town’s history?” she asked. He shrugged. One book did mention the playhouse, but nothing about Adam Parrish.

He decided to try Google instead. The library computer pulled up a lot of results about a Scottish musician. In the first few pages, only one result seemed potentially relevant—an excerpt from a book called _Mysteries of the Silver Screen._ He read:

_Adam Parrish was a familiar face in Biograph Studios films of the early 1910s, often starring in romantic or comedic roles. Parrish was also a stage actor who performed off Broadway and in regional theaters. He was known for his appearances as fae-like creatures in Shakespeare—Puck and Ariel. However, he had disappeared from both stage and screen by late 1912. While coworkers blamed this on Parrish’s difficult relationship with his father, friends noted that his behavior and manners had changed after a six-week stint at a theater in his native Virginia. Always reserved, Parrish became secretive and rarely left his room. Some suspected an ill-fated love affair, while others wondered if something more sinister, even occult, was responsible for these changes. At the end of the summer of 1912, Parrish left New York and was never seen again. Some Biograph company members looked for him to no avail, and in the years that followed, several theories emerged—that he had been killed or committed suicide, or that he had changed his name and chosen to live in obscurity. To date, no clues as to his fate have ever been found._

On the next page was the same portrait of Adam Parrish that he’d just seen in the art gallery.

Ronan was confounded. Nothing in his encounter with this person had suggested secrecy or the occult.

Blue was at his shoulder again, saying, “I didn’t really find anything I want here. Can we go back to the hotel? Gansey brought his computer. You can use that instead.”

“Chill, maggot,” said Ronan distractedly. She huffed. He decided to print out both pages and take them with him.

Back at the hotel, he reread this paragraph over and over, and stared at the picture—a terrible, grainy reprint—and he tried to make sense of it all. Adam Parrish was an actor. He had come to Chincoteague in 1912 to perform. That had to be the “stint at a theater in his native Virginia.” After that, his behavior had changed, and by the end of that year, he’d vanished without a trace.

It occurred to Ronan that if Adam Parrish had come to the 21st century and gotten stuck there, that would account for his disappearance pretty neatly. Of course it would’ve been impossible for his friends to find him if he was _in a different century._

That didn’t explain how he knew Ronan—how they had apparently met before in Adam’s timeline, but not yet in Ronan’s. It wasn’t a case of mistaken identity, either—he had said Ronan’s name.

Ronan thought about the boy’s pretty face, and the feeling of their hands pressed together, and he wondered if there was any chance that he himself had something to do with the “ill-fated love affair.”

He went to find Blue. She was out on the balcony, staring at the ocean. “It’s beautiful here,” she said, “but I’m so bored. How long are we staying again?”

“Tuesday,” he said. It was Saturday.

“Okay, I’ll live,” said Blue. “I shouldn’t complain about a mostly free vacation.”

He sat down beside her and watched the waves come in and tried to summon words. It was hard. Finally, he forced himself to say, “I need to tell you something. It’s weird, but I need you to believe me.”

“How weird is weird?” said Blue. “My whole family’s psychic, and you can take things out of your dreams.”

“Fair point,” said Ronan. “This is new, though. I think I met a time traveler.”

He hadn’t told Blue about the incident at the library. He’d only told Gansey because of the pocket watch. He tried to explain it to her now—the boy, his clothes, his delight at seeing Ronan, his certainty that they knew each other, the comment about the wrong time, and the pocket watch.

“That is weird,” said Blue.

“It gets weirder,” he told her. “Earlier, at that art gallery, I saw a picture of that same guy, and it said that he performed at the Chincoteague Theater in 1912. And then at the library, I found this.”

He handed her the pages he’d had clutched in his hands. She read it carefully. “What do you think this means?”

“I think he disappeared because he came to our time.”

“Mmm…” She looked over the papers again. “That makes sense, but what does it have to do with you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m supposed to meet him, but I don’t know when or where. He said I should give the watch back to him later.”

Blue seemed to be mulling this over. “I know this doesn’t really answer any questions,” she said, “but if he was actually a pretty famous actor at the time, we ought to be able to find out more about him, pre-disappearance. Maybe that would help us figure it out. I bet we could even find some of his movies.”

“The library would have shit like that,” said Ronan. “I mean, my library.”

_“Your_ library. So cute,” said Blue.

“I’m not cute,” said Ronan. They went back inside.

Gansey never took them to see the horses as promised—he was too busy. Blue and Ronan spent a lot of time on the beach instead, swimming and getting sunburned. They ate a lot of seafood and complained about the heat. They went to the little amusement park, which was better than nothing, and that was about all you could say for it. They went back to the art gallery twice to stare at Adam Parrish’s picture, but it didn’t reveal any more secrets. Blue asked the gallery owner if she knew anything about it, but she didn’t.

In the car on the way back to DC, Ronan said, “Gans, I have an update on the boy from the library.”

“Pocket watch guy?”

“Yeah.” He explained about Adam’s picture and his mysterious disappearance.

“Time travel,” said Gansey, awed. “Can you even imagine? To be able to go back and see how life was in another era? To witness historical events? To meet people who changed the world?”

“If I invent time travel, I’m not taking you to see Glendower,” Ronan informed him.

Gansey seemed like he was about to argue, but Blue swept in. “We don’t know what to do next. Like, where to go from here.”

“Maybe we should consult the psychics,” said Gansey.

“I wanna go to my library,” said Ronan.

“You know Calla’s been staying at my place while we were gone,” Blue told Gansey.

“Take me to my library,” said Ronan.

“Oh, maybe we should head over there,” said Gansey to Blue.

_“Take me to my fucking library.”_

They went to Blue’s. Ronan sulked about it, and Calla—one of Blue’s weird aunts—smirked at him when they walked in. “Having a little trouble, Snake? A blast from the past?”

“How do you already know that?” he mumbled.

“I’m a psychic. That’s what we do.”

“I haven’t even said anything yet.”

“You don’t have to.” She walked over and reached for his hand, and he jumped back. She’d tried this trick on him before. Psychometry, or whatever. She’d said something that he really hadn’t wanted to hear. Hadn’t wanted anyone else to hear.

“Ronan, this could help,” Blue reminded him. So he gritted his teeth and let Calla take his hand.

Immediately, she said, “You’re going to be there, too. I can see him here and you there.”

“Where is there?” Ronan asked. “Chincoteague?”

“Not where, but when,” said Calla. “I can see you in his time.”

“Maybe you _are_ going to invent time travel,” said Blue.

“How the fuck would I do that?” Ronan asked. “I’m not a scientist.”

“You know how,” said Calla. “You already have a power most people don’t.”

For Gansey and Blue, this was enough confirmation that Ronan was meant to go to the past. Ronan still just wanted to go to his library.

Gansey and Blue followed him inside, which was annoying, because all of the librarians wanted to meet his “adorable” friends and hear all about their trip. It took almost 20 minutes of small talk before Ronan could finally get behind the reference desk and get shit done. He hit all the databases he could think of, starting with cinema studies, then theater and history. 

He found that same book from before, _Mysteries of the Silver Screen._ He found mentions of Adam Parrish in other books, but nothing helpful. He found couple of film clips with the name Adam Parrish in the tags. One was only 10 minutes long but seemed to tell an entire story of a young man who was falsely accused of a crime and sentenced to die. His mother and sister cried a lot. Ronan hadn’t watched a ton of silent films, but it was about what he expected—very melodramatic, choppy, and boring. But the main character was easily recognizable as the boy from the library. Further proof of his existence.

The second film clip was just labeled, “Behind the Scenes,” and it seemed to be quite literally shots from backstage in a theater. Sets being built, costumes being sewn. One part showed some of the actors sitting around backstage eating lunch. Ronan had just finally caught a glimpse of Adam when Blue, who was watching over his shoulder, gasped. “Run that back,” she said. He rewound a few seconds. “Stop. Pause it there,” said Blue.

It was the frame with Adam in it. He was holding a sandwich and looking at the camera with just a hint of annoyance.

“What, Sargent?” Ronan asked. “I mean, that’s him—”

“That’s _you._ Look!” She pointed to the person sitting next to Adam, who held one hand up like he was waving. His face was a little blurry, but he did look like Ronan.

“My god,” said Gansey, voice shaky. “Ronan, you marvelous thing. You’re a time traveler.”

“Not yet,” said Ronan, but he kept staring at that face, becoming more and more convinced that it was him. A chill ran down his spine.

He was going to have to dream a time machine.

Then he was going to find Adam Parrish and see what all this meant.

His first few attempts at dreaming a time machine were unsuccessful. He had no idea what a time machine ought to look like or how it ought to function. When he closed his eyes and thought about it, he came up with a DeLorean. He couldn’t really test its time-travel capabilities in the dreamworld, but when he turned the key in the ignition, it wouldn’t even start. He left it in the dream.

His second attempt was something that looked like a telephone booth. The British kind, red with glass windows. Inside was a lever you’d pull to take you to the past. There didn’t seem to be any way of specifying where you wanted to go. Ronan was wary of this, and it seemed too unwieldy anyway, taking an entire telephone booth into the past with him.

His next idea was that maybe instead of something you’d climb into, it should be something you could hold. Something small and compact that knew exactly where you wanted to go and could move you there.

He managed to bring something like this out of another dream, a few days after coming back to DC. It was small, round, and metal. On top it had a little button you could push. He showed it to Gansey and Blue and tried to explain how it was supposed to work, based on his dream logic. “You have to think about where you want to go. There isn’t any way to like, specifically tell it. So you have to just focus really hard on what you want. So in my case, I’d have to picture the guy and the hotel. Then you push the button three times, and it takes you there.”

“That’s very Wizard of Oz,” said Blue. “Tap your heels together three times…”

“Fuck off, Sargent.”

“What will you do if it doesn’t work?” Gansey asked.

Ronan was a little annoyed that Gansey had so little faith. “I’ll just try again,” he said.

“How long do you think you’ll stay in the past?” Blue asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “However long it takes to figure out what’s going on. And to get to know the guy or whatever.”

She gave him a small, knowing smile that he didn’t appreciate.

Gansey clapped his hands in the way he did when he was eager to get started on something. “We’ve got to get you the right kind of clothes. You can’t go to 1912 like that.”

Ronan figured jeans and t-shirt would work just fine in the past, even if they were all black, but Gansey wouldn’t hear of it. All the same, Ronan refused to go to an actual fucking tailor to have era-appropriate clothes made—that had been Gansey’s first suggestion. He also made it clear that he was never, ever going to wear a three-piece suit like the ones Gansey was showing him on his phone.

“You said 1912, right?” asked Blue, looking thoughtful. “Let’s get you some Leo DiCaprio in ‘Titanic’ kind of clothes. Just plain shirts, pants, and suspenders.”

That, he could live with. That was also something they could find easily. They hit up a department store, the kind of place Ronan would normally never go, and bought an assortment of button-up shirts and dark pants, nothing too modern-looking, nothing made of polyester or anything like that. Plus some suspenders. And one vest and jacket set, to appease Gansey.

It was when they were walking out of the store that Gansey frowned and said, “Are you going to stay at the hotel while you’re there?”

“I guess so,” said Ronan. “I don’t know where else I’d stay.”

“How are you going to pay for that?”

Ronan was going to have to dream himself some 1912 money.

He did it that night, after looking carefully at pictures so he could make it as accurate as possible. He tried not to feel guilty about the fact that he’d be ripping off the hotel with counterfeit bills.

The next day, the three of them packed his new clothes into an old-fashioned suitcase of Gansey’s. Ronan sat on his bed and said, “Wish me luck.” Then, with Gansey and Blue watching, he closed his eyes and thought about Adam Parrish. He tried to picture him as clearly as possible from the day in the library. He thought about the two of them captured together on ancient film. He thought about The Island Hotel, the long porches and the hill behind it that sloped down to the beach.

He pushed the button three times.

When he opened his eyes, he was standing in a narrow hallway that he was certain he’d never seen before. The walls were rough wood. He turned around, and there was a door with a window, through which he could see a busy kitchen. He guessed by the shape of it that it was the hotel’s kitchen. The layout was relatively the same as it in 2015, even if all the appliances were completely different.

He couldn’t go through the kitchen without being noticed, so he went the other way down the hall until he came to another door. This one led outside, to the very hill that Ronan had been picturing. He looked down to the beach. One person sat alone on the dunes. A thin young man with sandy hair.

Ronan took a deep breath.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Is it you?” Adam asked. It was the first thing he could think of to say, and he realized he ought’ve started with something more conventional, like hello.

There was someone in the periphery of Adam’s vision trying to tell him something.

There often was. They’d been coming since he was a child, since he’d fallen out of a tree in a forest near his house and had woken up mysteriously covered in vines. 

The people in his periphery came to warn him, usually, when something was about to go wrong. Adam sometimes wondered if the fall had knocked something loose in his head, if the people he saw and heard were hallucinations. But they were always right—their warnings always came true.

When he was 15, a psychic woman had come to his house and told him that he would be a successful actor in a year’s time. His mother had overheard, scoffed, and called the woman crazy and a charlatan. But then an acting troupe had passed through Adam’s hometown only a few months later, looking to add to their ranks. He’d performed with them for three years before he got an offer to make a moving picture instead, and he’d had steady work in that industry ever since.

His parents were pleased—because of the money—and had forgotten all about the psychic woman. Adam had not. He’d gone back to see her a few times since then. She’d held his hand and told him that he was psychic, too. She’d taught him how to listen to the people who appeared to him sometimes. How to heed their warnings without losing his mind over it.

Lately, those shadowy figures had been coming to his dreams, too, always saying the same thing: _he is coming._ They showed him images of himself standing on a dune overlooking the sea, and a tall, dark-haired man approaching him. Despite the foreboding tone of his usual visions, he had the impression that this was a benevolent figure, someone he’d be happy to know. Sometimes this image was accompanied by flashes of other things—kissing, hands clasped together. Some things that made Adam blush when he woke up.

On his first night in Chincoteague, in the summer of 1912, he walked outside his hotel and down to the beach, and he recognized the dune from his dreams. After that, he made sure to go as often as he could—whenever he wasn’t tied up in rehearsals—to stand on the dunes and look at the sea and wait for the man who was supposed to come to him there.

It took less than a week. Sundays were free, of course, so he stayed on the shore longer that day. It was around 4, and the heat was starting to get to him, and he was thinking of going inside. Unlike in his dreams, he was sitting when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned, and at first, he couldn’t see anything because the sun was in his eyes. Then the man blocked the sun. Tall. Dark hair, closely cropped. Pale eyes. A sharp, intense face.

“Is it you?” Adam asked. It was the first thing he could think of to say, and he realized he ought’ve started with something more conventional, like hello.

But the man said, “Yes. You were expecting me?”

“In a way.” Adam turned to face the sea again, certain the man wouldn’t walk away.

He didn’t. He came and sat beside Adam, a little too close, a familiarity Adam wouldn’t have allowed normally. But this wasn’t normal.

“Do you know who I am?” the man asked. He had a low voice, and he asked the question like nothing in the world could be more important.

“No,” said Adam, “but I knew you were coming. Who are you?”

“I’m Ronan Lynch,” said the man. “I met you in the future.”

Adam stared at him. Nothing was outside the realm of possibility for him anymore, but this was something he’d never encountered—a visitor from the future. “You met me?”

“You gave me this.” The man, Ronan Lynch, showed him a very nice gold pocket watch. Adam had never owned such a thing.

Adam opened his mouth to reply, but then he heard his name being shouted. His father was lumbering down the hill from the hotel, and by the tone of his voice, Adam knew not to keep him waiting. “I’ve got to go,” he told Ronan Lynch, hopping up.

Ronan grabbed his wrist. “But we have to talk.”

Adam’s father was coming closer, and he was staring at the place where Adam’s skin touched Ronan’s. “Later,” Adam hissed. He pulled himself free and hurried up the hill to head his father off. They walked back to the hotel together.

Adam didn’t have to wait long to see Ronan again—he burst dramatically into the hotel dining room halfway through Adam’s dinner that night. As the host politely tried to seat him, Ronan scanned the dining room with a determined look and made a beeline for Adam as soon as he saw him.

Adam was sitting with both his parents and his director, and it couldn’t have been a worse time for his dreams to crash into real life. He stood and excused himself as quickly as possible, but of course all three of his dinner companions watched as he crossed the room and pulled Ronan back out into the lobby.

The lobby wasn’t empty, so Adam whispered, aiming for a tone that didn’t invite questions. “If you want to talk about this, you will meet me tomorrow morning at 7 o’clock in the boathouse. You will not bother me until then. Am I quite clear?”

Ronan looked back with a defiant glint in his eye, but he said, “Crystal clear, Parrish,” and disappeared in the same dramatic way he’d appeared.

Adam still didn’t know what any of it meant, but he was willing to wait until the next morning to find out, unlike _some_ people who were apparently quite impatient.

(Also he hadn’t told Ronan his name.)

He was pleased to find, at 7 in the morning, that his parents were still asleep and the boathouse was empty. He’d been counting on both of these things. Ronan came tumbling into the boathouse only a minute after Adam, with the same fierce look in his eyes that he’d had the night before. Adam thought about his visions and thought that Ronan was rather handsome, in a savage kind of way. Adam wouldn’t mind kissing someone like that—it would surely be passionate, at least.

“You were going to explain,” said Ronan.

“Good morning to you too,” said Adam, amused. He leaned against one of the stacked canoes and stuck his hands in his pockets. “I can’t explain because I don’t know what’s going on any more than you do.”

Ronan was clearly not pleased, but he let out a long breath and some of that intensity seemed to ebb out of him.

“Let’s review the facts, then,” said Adam, when it was obvious that Ronan wasn’t going to speak. “I’ve had psychic visions telling me that you were coming. You say you saw me in the future, and I gave you a pocket watch. What did I say to you?”

Ronan looked conflicted. “You were happy to see me,” he said gruffly. “You were disappointed that I didn’t know who you were, and you said, ‘This is the wrong time. I’ll have to try again.’”

“It all makes sense,” said Adam, in awe.

“Does it?”

“Yes—you’re a time traveler. You must be, if you met me in the future.” Ronan nodded. “Clearly, I’m going to become one as well, but I came to the wrong time—I was trying to find you after you’d already met me, but I made some mistake. I imagine time travel is an imprecise science.” He’d never considered such a thing, actually, but maybe it took a little trial and error to travel to the desired time.

“It wasn’t for me,” said Ronan.

“How did you accomplish it?” Adam asked, curious.

Ronan looked like he didn’t want to say. “I dreamed a device for it.”

“You dreamed it?” Adam smiled and stepped closer to him. Ronan must be a bit of a genius, then. That phrasing, as if the idea had come to him fully formed.

“You said you’re psychic?” said Ronan. “I know these witches back home—I mean, they’re psychic too or whatever. One of them saw me in the past with you. But, why? Why is all this happening?”

Adam thought about the other part of his visions—the intimacy. It was too terrifying to admit to. He said, carefully, “I suppose we’re going to be important to each other in some way.”

Ronan nodded, frowning like that wasn’t enough.

“Can you stay here for a bit?” Adam asked. “Do you need to go back to your own time?”

“I don’t think it matters,” said Ronan. He lifted his arm and chewed on leather bands he wore around his wrist.

“Well, then, stay,” said Adam. “We can get to know each other a bit.” He felt awfully bold saying that, given what he knew. “We can try to find the meaning behind all this.”

“All right,” said Ronan. “What do you want to do today? Is there somewhere we can go around here that isn’t ridiculously boring?”

Adam laughed. Ronan sounded like a child. “I have rehearsal all day most days.”

“How the fuck are we supposed to get to know each other then?”

Adam laughed again. “Not standing on ceremony, are you? You’ll just say whatever you like.”

“Fuck yeah I will,” said Ronan, petulant.

“Meet me on the beach after supper,” said Adam. “We’ll talk again.”

Adam was rehearsing to be Puck in _A Midsummer Night’s Dream._ This wasn’t a very high-paying job, but Adam’s father had accepted the offer on his behalf because his friend’s cousin or somebody was the owner. He was a large, sleazy man, who didn’t much care about the inner workings of the theater so long as he made a bit of profit at the end of the day. On the days he came to the theater at all, he tended to sit outside smoking with Adam’s father and other men of their ilk.

This was how Adam’s career worked: when he was making pictures for Biograph, his parents didn’t interfere. He was in New York, and they were in Virginia, and they didn’t care what he did as long as he was working steadily and sending them money. But when he took a break from the moving pictures, his parents always wanted to know about it. Any offer he received to perform on stage, his parents weighed in. If it wasn’t enough money, they heavily hinted that they would prefer he didn’t take it. The hints were followed by threats. Chincoteague was an exception, and a particularly unpleasant one, because it was in Virginia, so his parents had come to stay with him. Adam was footing the bill.

What his parents didn’t understand was that the moving pictures were not an especially lucrative business. Adam made a lot of money because he worked _so much,_ making multiple one-reel pictures every month. He was constantly exhausted. That was why he planned to stay two weeks longer in Chincoteague than he actually had to, just to have a bit of a break.

If his parents had understood this, they still wouldn’t have cared.

Now he had an offer to perform on Broadway—more prestigious than anything he’d done before—and he would have taken it in a heartbeat except that his parents wanted him to, and that put a damper on everything.

Sometimes he asked himself why he hadn’t severed ties with them yet. There was a bit of guilt, certainly, but in theory, he could send them money without actually speaking to or seeing them. In practice, though, they knew exactly where to find him as long as he stayed in New York, and they wouldn’t give up control of him so easily. He felt trapped.

He wondered if Ronan had just given him a way out.

In the meantime, though, he was enjoying Puck, a way to let out much more mischief than he ever allowed himself in real life. The other actors here were a jovial lot. He knew some of them from his years of bouncing around regional theaters and picture sets. He took his lunches with them, talking about the business, swapping stories. The little girls who were playing some of the fairies liked Adam and swarmed him at least once a day. He started bringing bits of wood along with him and carving toys for them, something he enjoyed doing anyway.

He was still tired, though. They had another nine days of rehearsing, followed by two weekends of performances. His friend Billy, a Biograph cameraman, was coming down to visit when the play opened, with the aim of filming it.

Adam found himself explaining all this to Ronan that night on the beach. Ronan was a surprisingly attentive listener, rarely looking away from Adam, asking the occasional question. 

When Adam was talked out, Ronan said, “I read a little about your career. After I met you, when I was trying to figure out who you were. I even saw clips from one of your movies.”

“I don’t suppose you should tell me if I’m going to be wildly famous someday,” Adam joked.

“You’re famous enough already that I could find information about you 100 years later,” said Ronan, serious. 

Adam turned that thought around in his head for a few minutes.

“Puck, man,” said Ronan. “You don’t seem like the type.”

“You don’t know me yet,” said Adam.

“I will,” said Ronan. “Just give me a little more of your time.”

“I don’t have very much time,” said Adam.

At some point, though, he agreed to meet Ronan on the beach every night that week.

His parents took notice, accused him of “sneaking out.” They didn’t try to stop him, though. It wasn’t as if they actually enjoyed his company. 

He slowly began to learn more about Ronan—that he’d grown up on a farm, that he had two brothers, that he lived in Washington DC now and worked in a library, that he missed home. Ronan stayed resolutely away from the topic of his parents, so Adam gathered that there was some problem there, and he wasn’t going to ask. He understood about messy family situations.

What he didn’t learn: anything else about time travel or why they’d been brought together. Adam’s visions had stopped, as if they expected him to take over from there. He thought about what he’d seen, thought about their bodies pressed together, or their hands at least, and he found himself longing for it. He knew that the idea had been put in his head, but he thought that he would’ve wanted this anyway, would have wanted Ronan’s intensity and unwavering attention directed towards him as it was now.

Ronan didn’t show any signs of wanting to kiss him, however.

The following Sunday, a week after they’d met, Ronan talked him into spending the day together. Ronan had apparently made friends with some of the hotel staff, and an enthusiastic boy named Noah let them borrow a rowboat that belonged to the hotel.

“What on earth are we going to do with this?” Adam asked, secretly pleased at the idea of some kind of adventure.

“I’m going to take you sightseeing, Parrish,” said Ronan.

“You cannot lose or damage this,” said Noah. “It could mean my job.” They promised.

Ronan rowed them around the south side of the island, and he didn’t seem inclined to talk, so Adam leaned back and closed his eyes and enjoyed the sun on his skin. When he opened his eyes again, Ronan was watching him.

They rowed all the way over to Assateague Island, where they dragged the boat onshore, up the dunes, and tied it to a tree. “That’s the best I can do,” said Ronan. “If someone steals it, tell Noah I tried.”

“There are so many potential thieves around,” said Adam, looking back down at the empty beach and then the expanse of sea grass in front of them. “So what are we doing here?”

“I wanted to bike around the island, but then we didn’t have a way to bring bicycles over here. So I thought we could walk around instead.” Ronan looked a bit sheepish, rubbing the back of his neck and watching Adam’s face carefully, like he thought Adam wouldn’t like the idea.

“That’s fine,” said Adam. So they walked a bit. Further up from the beach, there were more trees, and the shade was a relief. It was getting hot.

After a while, Ronan spoke. “My friend Gansey promised he’d bring us over here to the wildlife refuge to see the horses, but he never did.”

“Wildlife refuge?” Adam hadn’t heard of it.

“Oh. Maybe it’s not one in 1912, but it is in 2015.”

“Tell me about your friends,” said Adam, because Ronan hadn’t mentioned them before. So he spent a while describing Gansey, who sounded like a mass of contradictions, and Blue, who sounded like someone Adam wanted to know. He wondered if everyone in 2015 had such odd names.

After a while, Adam asked what was in the basket that Ronan had been carrying the whole time. Apparently, it was lunch. They scouted out a good place to eat—flat, not too sandy. Ronan spread out a blanket for them to sit on, and it felt a bit romantic, but then Ronan barely looked at him the whole time they were eating, even as they talked about this and that.

After lunch, they came across a salt pool, shady but sun-dappled in the middle. “Wanna take a dip, Parrish?” Ronan asked, and he smiled like a shark.

Maybe that smile should have been a warning, but Adam found it slightly thrilling instead. Before he could reply, Ronan was stripping to his underwear. Adam had conflicting thoughts about whether or not to watch, but when he looked up, he was mesmerized by Ronan’s enormous back tattoo. He was going to ask about it, but then Ronan said, “How deep do you think this is?”

Adam inched closer to the water. It was clear enough, but he couldn’t see the bottom. “Pretty deep.”

He turned to see Ronan testing the lowest branch of one of the surrounding trees. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like? I’m going for a swim.” He must have decided that the branch could hold him, because he hoisted himself up and quickly made his way up the tree.

“You’re crazy!” Adam shouted up to him. Ronan was apparently fearless, and Adam pictured this ending badly. His stomach was protesting as if he were the one about to jump out of a tree.

Ronan climbed halfway out a branch that hung over the water before flinging himself off it ungracefully with a hideous shriek. He hit the water hard and disappeared beneath it. Adam held his breath until Ronan came back up, spluttering, and said, “Water’s salty as fuck.”

Adam laughed, relieved.

“You coming in, Parrish?” Ronan leaned back and floated, nonchalant.

“Not like that, I’m not.” Adam began to undress, a little self-conscious because Ronan might see his scars. Then he walked into the pool like a civilized person.

The temperature was perfect, cool but not cold. Adam ducked under the surface and let himself enjoy it. When he came back up, Ronan was watching him. “Wasn’t sure if you were just gonna stay under or what,” he said.

They floated in silence for a bit, then Adam said, “Tell me about the future.” He hadn’t asked about it yet, afraid that the knowledge might be dangerous or at least overwhelming. But today he was in such a good mood that he felt like he could ask.

Ronan told him that moving pictures—he called them movies—were very popular in the future. “But they’re totally different. They have sound and color.” He said that the clothes were different. “Women can wear whatever.” He said, “the world’s kind of fucked,” but didn’t elaborate. He talked about a kind of music called rock and roll and sang a few bars of a song by someone called “The Stones.” It sounded like any other song. “It doesn’t if you have instruments,” Ronan insisted.

Then he spent a long time trying to explain a device called a “computer” and some kind of phenomenon called “the Internet.” All Adam really grasped was that it was a source of information. Ronan described it a few different ways before he settled on, “It’s like a really big library where you can look up anything, but it’s not physical. The books aren’t physical.”

This made no more sense than the other explanations. “How can you read something that isn’t physical?”

“You look at it on a screen. Like a movie.”

Adam pictured people sitting in a dark theater looking at a projected book filling one whole wall. That seemed like a lot of trouble to go to. You’d have to leave the house, and you couldn’t read at your own pace, and what if the theaters never projected what you wanted to read? He put that thought aside and asked, “What does that have to do with computers?”

“They have the screens that you read things on. The Internet is inside the computer—”

“Being projected out?”

“Sort of. Also telephones have the Internet in them now.”

Adam gave up trying to understand.

They raced each other back and forth across the pool a few times, and Ronan kept dunking Adam then swimming away before Adam could retaliate. When they’d had enough, they lay in the grass on the bank, letting the sun dry them off. Adam didn’t really want the day to end, but inevitably Ronan said, “Guess it’s time to head back.”

They walked back to the beach where they’d left the boat, and there, finally, they saw the horses, galloping through the surf, a blur of color. They stood on the dunes and watched them run until they disappeared on the horizon.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” said Ronan.

“Me neither,” said Adam. “It’s kind of magical.”

They started back to Chincoteague, and halfway there, Ronan said his arms were sore. “Didn’t realize quite how far it was over there,” he grumbled. Adam laughed at him and took over rowing.

Back at the hotel, they pulled the boat onshore and went to find Noah. As they walked, Adam caught Ronan watching him again. “You look happy,” he said.

“This is the happiest day I’ve had in ages,” said Adam.

They parted ways for the evening, and Adam went up to his room. It was connected to his parents’, but thank goodness, they didn’t come in. He lay down and replayed the day in his head.

He wasn’t brave enough yet to make any kind of romantic overture, no matter how much he wanted to. But he might be brave enough to ask Ronan to take him to the future.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “A serious romance would be a distraction from my career,” said Adam, still looking straight ahead. “He and my mother rely on me for money. Also, he knows you’re a hotel guest, so I think he’s afraid that I might run off with you to wherever you come from instead of going back to New York in a few weeks. Anyone close to me is someone who could influence me…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for Adam's dad being terrible, plus brief references to abuse.

Ronan hadn’t really planned to spend more than a week in the past, but nine days in, he wasn’t in any particular hurry to leave. He’d integrated himself there to some extent. He’d made friends with Noah, one of the hotel groundskeepers, and though Noah categorically refused to let him help with the work (“you are a _guest,_ Ronan”), he didn’t mind to let Ronan sit and bother him while Noah maintained the boats or looked after the horses in the stable or washed guests’ cars.

Henry, one of the dining room waiters, didn’t share Noah’s qualms, so he let Ronan help out in the kitchen during the day, washing plates or polishing silverware or whatever. Henry was a little annoying in his enthusiasm, and in the fact that he never stopped singing while he worked. He was shocked that Ronan had never heard of someone called Lillian Russell. “She’s only the greatest musical stage performer of our time!” he said, before launching into another one of her songs, something about an evening star.

Henry had noticed what he called Ronan’s “flirtation” with Adam Parrish. Ronan denied that’s what it was, and Henry laughed at him. “You spend _every_ evening with him. You spent an entire Sunday together on a romantic boat ride.”

Noah joined in on the teasing sometimes, although his teasing was a little more earnest. “You haven’t seen your face when you look at him,” he told Ronan.

“When have you seen that?” Ronan asked, trying to sound disdainful of the whole idea.

“You wouldn’t stop mooning at him across the dining room last night,” said Henry.

“I saw you watching him cross the lawn yesterday,” said Noah. “You looked so infatuated.”

“I am not infatuated!” said Ronan. They laughed some more. It made Ronan grumpy. Okay, so maybe he thought that Adam Parrish was completely adorable and smart and fascinating, but that didn’t mean they were having a flirtation. Adam obviously didn’t think of him that way, and Ronan wasn’t there for romance. He was there to find out why destiny had apparently wanted them to meet despite the 100-year time difference.

He was trying to forget that he’d ever read about Adam’s “ill-fated love affair.”

Nine days in, they hadn’t really solved the mystery, but he was pretty sure they had become friends. Two days before his show was set to open, Adam invited Ronan to the theater to watch them rehearse. This was when he realized Adam’s true brilliance as an actor. It hadn’t been evident in those film clips he’d seen. Adam was so much more vibrant in real life, and he was perfect as Puck, moving light-footed around the stage, magical and mischievous and conspiratorial. His voice was different. The Southern accent he tried to rein in normally disappeared completely on stage, which was a shame, but the higher-pitched tone he used for Puck worked well. Ronan mused that someone else, someone less focused on the Adam Parrish enigma, would probably forget they were watching an actor at all.

When he had a break, Adam came and sat with Ronan. He waved someone over and said, “Ronan, I want you to meet my friend Billy Bitzer. We work on pictures together when I’m in New York. He’s a brilliant cameraman.”

The man who came over seemed to be about 40. He shook hands with Ronan and said, “Adam’s exaggerating a little.”

“I’m not!” said Adam. “He’s come up with so many innovations in lighting and transitions and other effects.”

Billy explained that he was there to film the play when it opened. “We’ll see if we can do anything with it. It might draw a crowd in other theaters.”

He filmed a little bit backstage, too, and at one point he turned the camera on Adam and Ronan as they ate lunch together. Ronan waved awkwardly, and it wasn’t until Billy had walked away that he realized that was the clip he’d seen in the library. So Blue had been right—he _had_ been captured on film in 1912.

Adam said, “You don’t have to stay all afternoon,” but of course Ronan stayed. He wasn’t necessarily interested in the intricacies of stage movement and diction and costumes and all the other things they discussed between scenes, but he was interested in _Adam’s_ movement and diction and costumes.

He tried not to be too disappointed when Adam brushed past him without a word at the end of the day. He watched Adam make his way to the back of the house where someone was waiting for him—Mr. Parrish. Ronan recognized him from the hotel. Adam never ate dinner with Ronan, because he was expected to eat with his parents. They looked like unpleasant people even from a distance. They looked like odd, pale shadows of Adam. When he and Ronan were alone, he never talked about them.

Now, he and his father seemed to be arguing. Or at least, his father was arguing. Whether Adam was engaging or not was unclear. His father was leaning in close, face to face, poking Adam’s chest accusatorily. Ronan wanted to intervene, but one thing he’d learned so far was that Adam was fiercely independent. He probably wouldn’t appreciate the interference.

When it was obvious that the discussion was going to continue for a while, Ronan decided to leave. He slipped out a side door and walked back to the hotel by himself. He went down to the beach and sulked a bit about the way the day had ended. But he’d only been there about 15 minutes when Adam found him.

He was a little out of breath. “Where’d you go?” he asked. “I was going to walk back with you.”

“You seemed busy,” said Ronan, trying not to sound petulant.

Adam sat down with him. “About that…”

“You don’t have to explain.” Ronan hadn’t yet explained anything about his own parents or about his dreaming, which had fortunately not yet caused him any problems in 1912.

“No, I want to,” said Adam. “Because my father is angry about you.”

“About me?” Ronan had never spoken to the man. How could Adam’s father have a problem with him?

“He thinks I’m spending too much time with you.” Adam hugged his bent knees to his chest and stared out at the sea. “He seems to think there’s some kind of romance going on between us,” said Adam quietly. “And he doesn’t mind if I ‘dally with someone here or there’—those are his words—but this seems more serious to him, so he’s not pleased. I told him it’s not like that, but he already thinks I’m a liar, so he didn’t listen.”

Ronan felt like someone had ripped him open and exposed all his feelings. He didn’t really know how to continue to hide them if he and Adam were going to have this conversation. With difficulty, he asked, “Why would it matter to him one way or another?”

“A serious romance would be a distraction from my career,” said Adam, still looking straight ahead. “He and my mother rely on me for money. Also, he knows you’re a hotel guest, so I think he’s afraid that I might run off with you to wherever you come from instead of going back to New York in a few weeks. Anyone close to me is someone who could influence me…” Adam paused. “He doesn’t want to lose his hold on me. He doesn’t understand that the only hold is my own misplaced sense of obligation.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that they never taught me any loyalty, I just naturally have some. I don’t give them money out of love, just out of guilt that they might starve without it. But they never cared if I went hungry.”

“Shit,” said Ronan, for lack of anything else to say.

“Exactly.” Adam was quiet for a minute or two, clearly thinking hard about something. Eventually, he said, “There’s something I wanted to ask you.”

Ronan was afraid it was going to be something like _are you in love with me?_ Or _would you mind if I’m in love with you? (_That would be preferable but still terrifying.)

Adam asked, “Can I come back to the future with you?” Before Ronan could answer, he continued, “It seems like that’s what’s supposed to happen anyway. It seems like the only way I can ever escape my parents. I’ve been thinking about it—I have some money saved up that they don’t know about. If I left them some of that, it would help with the guilt. And I could use the rest to establish myself in the future—I suppose very old money would still be good there?”

“Shit, yeah, I think so,” said Ronan. He remembered the first time he’d seen Adam, in the library, and he tried to piece together his thoughts. “I don’t know anything about time travel really, but I think it’s dangerous to fuck with things that have already happened. I already met you in the library, and we weren’t together, you know?” He flushed a bit, because he didn’t mean _together_. “I mean, you traveled to the future without me, somehow. So I don’t think I’m supposed to take you with me.”

Adam nodded thoughtfully at all this and didn’t seem too disappointed. “But you could help me get there, couldn’t you? With the device you invented?”

“I guess so,” said Ronan. “I can show you how to use it. I might have to make you another one so we can travel separately.” Was now the appropriate time to mention the dreaming?

Adam smiled at him gratefully, and Ronan would do pretty much anything for another one of those smiles. “You don’t know what this means to me,” he said. “To have a way out. When I was younger, I used to dream about how I’d get out of my hometown and away from my parents. And I managed the first part but not the second. I didn’t know how I ever would.”

They lapsed into silence for a while, then Ronan said, “Where is your hometown, anyway? You’re from Virginia, aren’t you?”

“Western Virginia,” said Adam dully. “Henrietta.”

“You’re shitting me,” said Ronan.

Adam looked over, surprised. “No.”

“I’m from Henrietta. Well, Singer’s Falls, but you know, pretty much the same thing.”

Adam looked puzzled and a little amused. “Do you think that’s part of why we were supposed to meet? It’s such a coincidence.”

“Gansey says there are no coincidences.”

They stayed on the beach for a while longer— “I don’t care if my parents want me inside,” said Adam bitterly—and they talked about what Adam would do in the future.

“You’re a really fucking good actor,” said Ronan. “You could still do that. It might be harder to get started, but once you did…”

“Maybe I could go back to school,” said Adam. “My parents were always threatening to pull me out of school so I could work more, and then I ended up dropping out of high school to act, because it was my way out of Henrietta. But I sometimes regret that.”

Ronan decided not to mention that he was also a high school dropout. Instead he told Adam all about the GED, something he knew a lot about courtesy of Declan, who was always trying to convince him to get one.

“That sounds promising,” said Adam.

They talked until it was dark, and they realized they had missed dinner at the hotel. “It’s okay,” said Ronan. “We’ll sneak down to the kitchen, and Henry will find us something to eat.”

Henry did indeed, but he declared that Ronan owed him a favor. He also smirked a lot about the fact that Ronan and Adam were together.

Before Adam went up to his room, Ronan said, “Is your dad going to give you a lot of shit for tonight?”

“It’ll be all right,” said Adam. “He doesn’t beat me as much these days—doesn’t want to do anything to keep me from performing.”

And with that horrifying comment, he left.

Ronan woke up in the morning and found a note slipped under his door, in neat writing, apparently Adam’s. _I can’t meet you on the beach tonight. Have late rehearsal & dinner with the cast. Will you come to opening night? I’ll see you there instead. A.P._

Ronan was pleased that Adam cared enough to leave him a note, and he went downstairs smiling. He became a lot less cheerful as the morning wore on and he realized that he was facing an entire day without the prospect of seeing Adam, which had not yet happened to him since he’d been there. He sat outside with Noah like most days and tried not to complain, because he didn’t want to endure any more teasing. But Henry teased him anyway, that night at dinner. The afternoon had been excruciatingly boring, and the sight of Adam across the dining room was such a relief, like fresh air, even though Adam never looked his way. Henry caught him staring and laughed. “You really aren’t subtle at all, darling,” he said.

The next day he spent more than an hour wandering around town, hoping to find a flower shop. When he failed, he popped into the general store instead and asked the woman behind the counter, “Where can a person buy flowers around here?”

“We don’t buy flowers, honey,” she said. “We grow them in our own yards.”

“I don’t have a yard,” said Ronan, frustrated. “I don’t live here.”

The woman took pity on him and directed him to her friend’s house. “She has some real nice peonies that she’d sell to you for cheap.”

So Ronan went and made the transaction, then took the flowers back to the hotel and put them in water, in hopes they’d still look nice that evening. He had to beg a vase off Henry, who gave him a look that said, _you’ll never hear the end of this._

He walked around the hotel grounds aimlessly for the rest of the afternoon, hoping to run into Adam, which didn’t happen. It took way too long for evening to come. He went upstairs and put on his vest and jacket so he’d look a little nicer than usual. _Gansey would be proud,_ he thought. He skipped dinner at the hotel in favor of stealing another sandwich from the kitchen and walking back into town a little early. He carried the whole vase of flowers with him because he didn’t really know what else to do. He bought his show ticket at the theater box office and waited around outside until the doors opened.

Finally, finally it started. The first act felt impossibly long, because he couldn’t wait for Adam to come onstage. And whenever he did, for the rest of the night, he stole every scene. Ronan was amazed that the audience could pay attention to anything else. But maybe he was just projecting his feelings on everyone.

The play was already much more polished than it had been two days before. Maybe that shouldn’t have been surprising. They were all fully costumed now, and there was no stopping and starting. People who’d been flubbing their lines before got them all right now. A set piece that kept falling over during rehearsal had apparently been fixed.

Adam had the last word of the night, _give me your hands if we be friends,_ and the curtain closed to rowdy applause. After the curtain call, Ronan lingered in the house. Adam had said they’d see each other at opening night. Surely he was going to come back out.

A few other people were waiting around, and slowly, some of the actors emerged from the wings. Adam was one of the last. He was still in costume. He made his way through the crowd that had formed, coming straight towards Ronan.

Before Adam could say anything, Ronan thrust the flower vase at him and said, “For you.”

Adam smiled down at the flowers. “Thank you, that’s really nice,” he said.

Ronan felt awkward. What else was he supposed to say? Oh— “You were amazing.”

“Thank you.” Now Adam smiled at _him._ His eyes were rimmed with kohl, which made them look wider and bluer and more hypnotic than usual. His lips were dark and his cheeks were pink, though Ronan couldn’t tell if it was from makeup or just adrenaline. He was practically glowing, excited and energetic in a way that he wasn’t usually, except the day they’d gone to Assateague. He was so beautiful—Ronan couldn’t look away. He really wanted to kiss him.

Almost answering his wish, Adam put his arms around Ronan’s neck and came in close and whispered, “Meet me on the beach tomorrow morning instead. After breakfast.”

Ronan whispered back, “Okay.”

Adam let go and smiled at him once more before vanishing into the crowd, Puck-like.

They met the next morning. Ronan had barely slept for anticipating it. Adam seemed happy to see him. He looked fresh, like he had slept plenty, and the way his hair was blowing in the breeze was very distracting. He tugged on Ronan’s sleeve as a greeting and said, “Let’s walk. I don’t want my parents to look outside and see us.” He was in a cheerful mood, though, as they walked down the beach. “How did you like the play?” he asked.

“I told you, you were amazing,” said Ronan. “A perfect Puck.”

Adam nudged him. “But what about the rest of it?”

He thought about it. “Everyone was good. I liked Bottom. I mean, like, obviously he’s the funniest part.”

“Always,” Adam agreed.

“Did they have to make all the costumes so… diaphanous?”

Adam laughed. “That’s such a big word for you.”

“Shut up. I read. I just mean everybody looked like they were about to ascend into the heavens or something.”

“It’s supposed to add to the dreamlike quality.” He caught Ronan’s skeptical look and laughed again. “I don’t know! I don’t decide these things.”

They walked almost all the way to the south end of the island before Adam said, “I should probably get back. My parents will be expecting me for lunch.”

“Do you do everything they say?” Ronan asked. He hadn’t stopped thinking about the _he doesn’t beat me as much these days _comment_._ He wondered why Adam still had any feeling for them at all.

“It’s easier that way,” said Adam, suddenly a bit cold. “And believe me, I _haven’t_ been doing everything they want for the past two weeks. That’s why my father is so angry with me.”

“Still?”

“Still.”

After that, all of Ronan’s further attempts at conversation fell flat. Adam was still chilly by the time they got back to the hotel, and he didn’t say anything about meeting again.

Ronan went to the play again that night, and even though they hadn’t talked about it, he waited around afterwards again. Adam’s mother saw him across the room and glared at him. He tried to ignore her.

Apparently he was forgiven for that morning’s mistake, because when Adam finally appeared—out of costume this time—he only looked amused. “You don’t have to come every night,” he said.

Obviously Ronan was going to come every night. He tried to play it off. “What else am I going to do?”

Adam shook his head. “You’ll get sick of it.”

“I won’t get sick of you,” he said before thinking the better of it. Adam looked like he still didn’t believe it, but he wasn’t any less amused. “Will you meet me again tomorrow morning?” Ronan asked.

“I will,” said Adam.

Saturday morning, they stayed on the beach, hiding in the shadow of a dune so they couldn’t be seen from the hotel, if anyone happened to be looking. Adam talked about some of his New York friends. He said Billy had filmed the opening performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and was planning to stay in Virginia for another week. “This is his vacation. He works so much in New York. I do too. It’ll be a vacation for me too, now that rehearsals are over.” Then he talked about his castmates in Chincoteague, mostly stage actors who’d come from all over the country.

“Why would they come here?” Ronan asked.

“Work is work,” said Adam, shrugging. “They’re getting paid. And the playhouse here is always full. People come over from the mainland if they’re summering there. It’s something to do.”

Ronan was very content to just sit and watch Adam talk—the gestures he made with his oddly lovely hands, the thoughtful way he chose his words, the light in his eyes when he talked about being onstage (“I like it better than the pictures, honestly”). When they lapsed into silence, Ronan tried not to stare so much, but he couldn’t help glancing Adam’s way every minute or two to admire the dreamy look in his eyes, gazing at the ocean, and the way he was sitting with his chin on his arms on his knees.

Ronan was so far gone, honestly.

Inevitably, Adam was the first to say, “I have to go.”

He stood and brushed the sand off his pants, and Ronan kept watching him and asked, “Will you meet me again tomorrow morning?”

“If you like,” said Adam. “Will you come to the play tonight?”

“If you like,” said Ronan.

Adam smiled. “You really don’t have to.”

“I want to, though.”

So he went, of course. As Adam predicted, Ronan was getting a little tired of some parts of it, but he wasn’t the least bit tired of Adam wreaking havoc as Puck. And he wasn’t tired of looking at Adam’s legs in the green tights he wore.

Ronan woke up Sunday morning feeling particularly lighthearted. He’d had a night of pleasant dreams, for once. Also, he was about to see Adam.

He ate breakfast and walked out to the beach, to their usual spot, like the past two mornings. And he waited. And he waited. And Adam didn’t come. Ronan stayed on the beach for an hour, his good mood slowly ebbing away. He had a strong feeling that this wasn’t Adam’s fault. It was something his parents had done.

Adam had never told Ronan his room number, but Henry had let slip that it was somewhere in the northern wing of the third floor. Ronan walked up and down that hallway, listening at doors like a complete creep, hoping to hear a voice he recognized, but he heard nothing. He wasn’t brave enough to knock on any of the doors. He didn’t know what would happen if he found them. He didn’t want to make things worse for Adam.

He sluggishly took himself outside and to the carriage house to see Noah. Noah wasn’t always easy to track down, because he did so many different jobs, but the carriage house was the most likely place, and luckily that’s where he was. Ronan stood in the doorway and waited for Noah to notice him.

Noah looked up and squinted at him in the bright light coming in the door. “Ronan? Is that you?” He stood from where he was working and walked over. “I needed to talk to you, but I haven’t had time to come looking for you yet today. Adam left this morning.”

“Left?” How could he leave? The play wasn’t over yet—they had three more performances the following weekend. And how could he leave when they hadn’t sorted the time traveling or… absolutely anything else?

“Yes, he went up to Maryland with his parents,” said Noah. “I don’t know why. He said he’d be back Wednesday night. He said he didn’t have time to write to you, but he wanted me to tell you that he was sorry he couldn’t meet you.”

“Oh.” Well. It was a relief that he wasn’t gone for good, but… “Fucking hell.”

Noah laughed at him. “Oh, I wasn’t going to tease you about this, but you really are so predictable. Can’t be away from your lover-boy for four whole days?”

“He’s not my lover-boy,” Ronan snapped. Noah just smiled and went back to work fixing a car, and Ronan came and sat on a bench at the back of the garage area. He worked through this in his head. Adam wouldn’t have left so suddenly if it didn’t have something to do with his parents. Right? And his parents didn’t like that he was spending time with Ronan. “I think they’re trying to get him away from me,” he said out loud.

“Who’s they?” Noah asked.

“His parents. They don’t like me. They think Adam and I are together or whatever, and they think that’ll distract him from his work and he’ll make less money to give them.” Ronan kicked the nearest available object, an oil can.

“That’s a little crazy,” said Noah.

“No fucking kidding.”

Noah stopped and looked up. “Ronan, once and for all, what’s going on with you two? If everyone thinks you’re in love with each other…?”

_“Nothing.”_ He kicked the can harder. “Look, I’m not saying I don’t… want that.” God, words were hard. Feelings were harder. “But it’s not happening right now. And his parents are a nightmare.”

“If you’re already getting in trouble for courting him, you might as well do it for real,” said Noah sagely.

_“Courting.”_ Ronan snorted.

“I’m saying if you like him, tell him.”

Ronan was probably not going to do that. What he was going to do was tell Adam about the time travel device as soon as he came back and teach him how to use it, so if they were separated again it wouldn’t matter so much. But until then…

“What the hell am I going to do for four days?” He wished he could go home for a bit. He weirdly kind of missed Gansey. And Matthew. And Blue a little. And like, modern conveniences. But if he went home, he wasn’t sure he could come back. At least not to the right time.

He stayed and bothered Noah for most of that day, and Noah didn’t kick him out. “Not when you’re already so sad,” he said, teasing again. Finally he was allowed to help a little with the cars. “To cheer you up,” said Noah.

The next day he bothered Henry instead, and washed a lot of plates, and even mopped the damn kitchen before Henry chased him outside. “You’re too gloomy for me,” he said. “You need some sunshine.”

The third day he walked the entire island and helped some old lady with her cows that had gotten out of the pasture, and that was the most exciting thing that happened that day, until he came back to the hotel and found a letter waiting for him from Adam.

_Ronan, I hope Noah explained my absence to you and gave you my apologies. If not, here they are. I had to go away very suddenly, and I’m sorry I didn’t have time to tell you. I’ll be back late Wednesday, but I probably can’t see you on Thursday. Maybe that night. There are some things I want to tell you when I do see you. Sincerely, A.P. _

It wasn’t very satisfying.

Wednesday, Ronan spent another day following Noah and Henry around. Thursday, he felt practically unhinged, knowing Adam was there but they couldn’t see each other. He took another long walk to try to deal with it but made sure he was back to the hotel for dinner. Adam’s parents were there, eating with their usual unpleasant expressions. Adam wasn’t with them.

If he hadn’t actually come back, Ronan was going to lose his mind.

After he ate, he practically sprinted back into town to get to that evening’s performance of _A Midsummer Night’s Dream._ He could barely stay in his seat, he was so full of nervous energy. And then, in Act Two, there was Adam, glorious and lovely, like nothing had happened. Ronan was so confused.

In the middle of the third act, Adam’s friend Billy, the cameraman, came sneaking through the audience and over to Ronan’s seat. He put a finger to his lips and gestured for Ronan to come with him. They went backstage. Billy led him to the area where the actors dressed and sat between scenes. Some of them remembered Ronan and waved at him. “Adam wants to talk to you,” he said. “Just wait here, he’ll come and find you.”

Adam was onstage doing a monologue—Ronan could just barely hear him. He knew that after that, there was a long scene where Adam just had to stand and watch the lovers.

At the end of that act, Adam came racing backstage, wild-eyed, and spotted Ronan. He came over and said breathlessly, “I have two seconds, but I just wanted to say I’m so sorry about this week, and—will you wait for me here? We can talk when the show’s over.”

Ronan was a little too stunned, face to face with him for the first time in days, to say anything intelligent. “Okay.”

Adam nodded and went racing away again, back to the stage.

Towards the end, Ronan could see him waiting in the wings as the ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ section played out onstage. Ronan wished Adam would come and sit with him. But he’d already waited for days; he could handle a few more minutes.

Adam came back after the curtain call, and he still looked a little manic, and his makeup only added to the overall effect. “Ronan,” he said, and it was like he couldn’t believe they were together again, either. “Thank you so much for waiting.” He said it with such feeling, like he’d never been sorrier for anything, and then Ronan understood—Adam thought he was angry.

“It’s not a problem,” he said. He tried to make his face look a little more pleasant.

“I don’t want to make you wait anymore, but I have to go deal with my parents for a moment,” Adam said. “I’m telling them that I’m going for a drink with Billy. They like him. That’ll give us a bit of time.”

“Okay.”

Finally, finally, they were alone together in one of the dressing rooms. Adam took his makeup off and changed back into his usual clothes. Ronan tried not to sneak too many glances—he didn’t want to be creepy—but he remembered Adam’s body well from when they swam together. All tan skin and wiry muscles and odd scars. Fascinating.

“I’m sorry,” said Adam again.

“I know it’s not your fault,” said Ronan. “Your parents, right? They made you leave?”

Adam winced. “Yes.”

“To get you away from me?”

“Yes.”

Someone came around to say that the theater was closing, so they went outside and walked.

“They thought that a few days would ‘knock some sense into me,’” said Adam. “How could I jeopardize my career over some boy? I tried to tell them that it isn’t like that, but they thought I was lying. And I was, in a way, because I’m about to abandon everything to go to the future.”

Ronan was stuck on _knock some sense._ “They didn’t hurt you, did they?” Ronan could feel his anger rising.

Adam shot him a cold look, which Ronan really wasn’t expecting. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

“What the fuck do you want to talk about, then?” Ronan shot back, and then regretted it, because he didn’t want this to turn into a fight. Adam treated him to frosty silence for a few minutes. To try to make peace, Ronan said, “Why did you go to Maryland specifically?”

Adam sighed. “They suddenly decided they just _had_ to see Ocean City. ‘When are we going to get another chance?’ Et cetera. They didn’t tell me the real reason until we got there, but I knew, of course.” He stopped abruptly. They were getting close to the hotel. “Here’s the thing, Ronan. I have two more days of the show. I was going to stay in Chincoteague for two weeks after that, because I need the rest, and my parents were going to go home. If they go, it doesn’t matter, but if they decide to stay here because they’re paranoid about you, I’m going to have to make a quick escape to the future.”

“I’ll show you how to use the time travel tool whenever you want. I need to make one for you.”

“Thank you.” Adam sounded relieved, but Ronan couldn’t really see his face. Suddenly, he turned and hugged Ronan. “I’m sorry I got angry.”

“It’s all right,” said Ronan. He stood there and silently prayed that Adam wouldn’t let go too soon.

They walked the rest of the way back to the hotel, and Adam said, “I’m not sure if I can see you tomorrow, but I need to find time for you to tell me about time travel. Just in case.”

“I’ll be around,” said Ronan. “I’m not hard to find.”

Before they parted ways, Adam hugged him again and whispered goodnight, and Ronan stood under the stars and thanked God or whatever force had thrown them together despite 100 years between them.

He didn’t see Adam on Friday, but Ronan was still in high spirits from the night before. He worked in the kitchen and let Henry teach him all the words to three Lillian Russell songs, and they sang together, and Ronan admitted that he used to do Irish music contests, then regretted it when Henry wouldn’t stop cackling.

He went to the play again that night. Of course he did. He waited around after, which turned out to be a mistake, because Adam never appeared, but his parents certainly noticed Ronan hanging around. When he got tired of their evil stares, he left.

Adam found him on the beach on Saturday morning even though they hadn’t planned it, and they walked to the southern end of the island again. They didn’t talk about time travel because Adam started telling him a story about a disastrous production of _Romeo and Juliet_ that he’d seen in New York, where the girl playing Juliet fell off the balcony, shouting obscenities on the way down. When that made Ronan laugh, Adam started telling more theater and movie horror stories that he’d seen and heard.

That afternoon, Ronan was lying out on the beach, farther down the shore, away from the hotel. It was empty and quiet there. He was half asleep, thinking about blue eyes, when he vaguely registered footsteps coming his way. A shadow blocked the sun, and he opened his eyes. He saw a face. He saw a cricket bat just before it hit him and everything went black.

He woke up with a splitting headache, in a dark room that smelled strongly of wet earth. His hands and feet were tied, and his mouth was gagged. Someone was shuffling around in the dark. Ronan made a muffled sound of alarm, and whoever was there with him said, “Did you wake up? Doesn’t matter much. I’m doing my best to make sure you don’t get out of here.”

A door opened over his head. Outside, it looked like dusk. He realized he was in some kind of cellar. Adam Parrish’s father was halfway up a ladder, on his way out. He smiled down at Ronan and said, “You think you could sneak around with him behind my back and I wouldn’t notice? You think I didn’t know he was with you Thursday night? It didn’t need to go this far, but that boy doesn’t listen. So I had to do something. Had to take care of you.”

Ronan just stared at him in silent horror. The man smiled and climbed the rest of the way out of the cellar. He took the ladder with him and closed the door. Ronan was plunged into darkness again, and he heard the sound of something heavy being moved over the top of the door.

He was completely trapped.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “How’d you find me?” Ronan asked. He’d finished eating and was leaning heavily on Adam.
> 
> “Ingenuity and tenaciousness,” said Henry.
> 
> “A far-fetched theory that happened to be correct,” said Adam. He was finally starting to believe it—Ronan was okay (mostly) and everything had reset. Adam could still go to the future. Adam could still, maybe, have love.

Adam was completely losing his mind.

Ronan hadn’t come to the final performance of _A Midsummer Night’s Dream._ Adam had been surprised, and a little hurt. He hadn’t come to the closing when he’d come to every other performance? Adam had secretly been hoping for more flowers.

On Sunday morning, he checked the beach, but Ronan wasn’t there. He wandered around the hotel grounds hoping to see him, but no luck. He found Henry in the kitchen and asked for Ronan’s room number, then went upstairs and knocked. No answer. He left a note: _meet me in on the beach this afternoon if you can._

Ronan never came to the beach.

By dinnertime, Adam was a little worried, and then Ronan wasn’t in the dining room like usual. Something was wrong…

On Monday morning, Adam’s parents left to go back to Henrietta. Adam glanced down at the beach as he left the hotel to walk into town with them. No Ronan.

Adam’s father had made more threats. He couldn’t stay and “gallivant” around Chincoteague anymore—he didn’t consider himself a man of “leisure” like Adam. He needed to get back to work.

“But I’m coming back in two weeks and I’m gonna take you to New York myself,” he said darkly. “So don’t you be getting any ideas about running off with that boy of yours.”

His father apparently hadn’t noticed that _that boy_ was missing.

Adam walked back to the hotel in a daze. Ronan wouldn’t have just _left,_ would he? He wouldn’t have gone back to his own time without a word? Unless it had been an accident? If it had been, then Adam’s only hope of escaping was gone.

If he was still in 1912 but not at the hotel, where else could he be?

Adam sought out Henry again to ask if he’d seen Ronan. He said no, and when Adam explained the situation, he frowned. “That doesn’t sound like our Ronan,” he said. 

So they went down to see Noah, and Noah agreed. “He wouldn’t have just left without saying anything to you—or us.” But Noah hadn’t seen him either.

That left Adam with his accidental time travel theory, and he couldn’t exactly share that with the others. He went up to his room and threw himself down on the bed, despondent.

Adam wanted out. He wanted that desperately. But that wasn’t the only thing he wanted. Ronan’s disappearance had also crushed his small, timid hope for love.

He thought about hands and lips and bodies touching—why had his visions shown him those things if they weren’t going to happen? Just to make him want what he couldn’t have?

He would have wanted that with Ronan even if there hadn’t been any visions.

He barely felt like eating, but he went down to dinner that night anyway. Ronan wasn’t there. Obviously. Henry came by Adam’s table and said, “Meet us in the carriage house. We have some thoughts about where he might be.”

Adam went. Noah was waiting for him, looking nervous, and Henry came in few minutes later.

“Tell me,” said Adam, a bit desperately. He sat on an overturned bucket and tried not to chew his fingernails.

Noah seemed like he didn’t want to say it. His voice was quiet. “Adam, do you think there’s any chance your parents did something to make him go away?”

Noah probably meant something like they paid him to leave, but Adam’s first thought was of the gun in his parents’ house and all the times he’d worried about what his father might do with it. The gun had stayed in Henrietta, but his father’s violent tendencies hadn’t.

“It’s possible,” said Adam. But he was so sure… “Ronan wouldn’t have gone away just because they wanted him to. They would have had to use force.”

Henry and Noah glanced at each other.

“I tend to agree,” said Henry. “Ronan seemed quite devoted to you.”

Adam flushed and hid his face. How embarrassing… and not really true…

“But he’s tall and strong,” Henry continued. “It wouldn’t have been easy to take him anywhere he didn’t want to go.”

“My father’s strong too,” said Adam. And then, “If he did something to Ronan, it would have to have been Saturday afternoon. The last time I saw him was that morning.”

“Was your father gone that afternoon?” Henry asked.

“I don’t know,” said Adam miserably. “I took a nap and then went to the theater.” How could he have been so careless? But… how could he have known? “I know my father was at the play that night.”

Noah, thinking out loud, said, “If your father was alone, he wouldn’t have been able to take Ronan off the island in that amount of time. So Ronan could still be here.”

“I hate to mention that we are surrounded by water,” said Henry, grimacing. “There would be ways to…”

“Stop,” said Noah. “We’ll only consider that once we’ve eliminated everything else.”

Adam groaned and hid his face again. If Ronan was hurt… or worse… because of Adam’s father… He would never forgive himself for letting that happen.

“If one wanted to hide a person on Chincoteague Island,” said Henry contemplatively, “where would one do that?”

“There are so many little coves,” said Noah.

“But it would have to be a place that Ronan couldn’t leave.” Henry stood and said, “I’m going to go to the employee apartments and ask around.”

“Don’t tell them everything!” Noah called after him.

“I’m not stupid!” Henry called back as he left.

Noah came over and sat with Adam and patted him on the back. “It’ll be all right.”

“I’m really not sure it will,” said Adam.

They talked it over some more, thought of some possible places—various abandoned buildings around the island. Henry came back with some similar ideas.

“Let’s go look,” said Adam, jumping up, unable to sit still any longer. “We’ll go to each place and just cross them off the list.”

“Until we find him,” said Henry. “Which we definitely will.”

It was getting dark, so they took lanterns, as well as a bag with food and water, in case Ronan really had been trapped alone somewhere for more than two days. First, they checked a couple of unused buildings that belonged to the hotel, although it didn’t seem plausible that Ronan could have been so close without anyone knowing. The buildings were empty.

They walked into town and peered into the windows of an empty storefront on one of the main streets, then walked around and knocked on the back door. Total silence.

“If he was here, someone would have probably found him by now,” said Noah. “But we can check here again later.”

They walked along the east side of the island and looked down into some of the coves Noah had mentioned. They explored an abandoned barn— “This is where I die,” said Henry, looking at the collapsing roof. As they picked their way through the inside, there was clearly nothing there but rusting farm equipment.

They’d been walking for more than an hour. Heading north, they came to a place that one of the other hotel employees had mentioned to Henry, a vacant house with a couple of outbuildings. It wasn’t very close to anything else. The house was boarded up, but Adam managed to force the door. They walked around the downstairs and called Ronan’s name, but there was no sign of him. The stairs had rotted, so at least they could be sure he wasn’t on the second floor. Outside, they checked two sheds—nothing there either.

Standing out back of the house, Noah said, “It’s awfully late. Maybe we should head back and try again tomorrow.”

Adam was on the verge of tears. He couldn’t give up. He couldn’t stand the thought of Ronan spending another night cold and hungry and alone—if he really was on the island somewhere. The alternative was still unthinkable. But it _was_ late, and he couldn’t ask the others to keep searching with him.

“When do you work tomorrow, Henry?” Noah asked. “I work in the morning, but if you were free early afternoon—”

“I can do that,” said Henry.

“I think I might look a little more on my own tonight,” said Adam, trying to sound firm and not like he was falling apart.

“Adam, I don’t know if that’s—”

There was a thud off to the right, followed by a muffled moan. Then another thud.

They all looked at each other. “Is someone there?” Adam called out. More thuds, and something that almost sounded like words, but not quite.

Behind the house there was a dilapidated couch that someone had left there, but under it— “There’s a door,” said Henry. This is where the thuds were coming from.

They moved the couch—an old, heavy thing. The door underneath led to a cellar. Someone was down there, still trying to speak. Adam didn’t really let himself think that it was Ronan. “We’re trying to help!” he called to whoever it was. They moved the long plank that was shoved between the door handles, then they opened the door, held their lanterns high, and peered down inside.

There was Ronan, in the cellar pit, looking up at them wide-eyed and scared but definitely alive. “Ronan,” said Adam, and he could’ve collapsed from relief. The cellar was too deep to climb out of. “How do we get him out of there?” He ran to the shed again, and after a moment, found some rope. He threw some down to Ronan and said, “Are you strong enough to hold on to that?”

Ronan’s mouth was gagged, but he nodded. He grabbed the rope and the three of them, with some effort, pulled him out. He collapsed on the ground.

Adam pulled the gag off. “Ronan, oh my god. Are you all right?”

He looked dazed. He managed a slurred, “M’aright.”

“Help me get these ties off,” Adam said. They freed his arms and legs, and Adam hugged Ronan tight, weak with happiness. He felt Ronan’s hands shaking as they reached up to touch Adam’s back. Adam pulled away. “Did my father do this to you?” he asked, so ashamed.

Ronan put his head on Adam’s shoulder and murmured, a little clearer now, “Doesn’t matter, Parrish.”

“It does matter,” Adam whispered back. But they could talk about that later. “Are you hungry?”

They sat behind the abandoned house for a long time, letting Ronan eat what they’d brought for him. He didn’t say much. Noah decided to go back to the hotel and borrow a wagon, so Ronan wouldn’t have to walk all the way back. “It’s awfully far,” Noah said. Adam and Henry stayed with Ronan.

“How’d you find me?” Ronan asked. He’d finished eating and was leaning heavily on Adam.

“Ingenuity and tenaciousness,” said Henry.

“A far-fetched theory that happened to be correct,” said Adam. He was finally starting to believe it—Ronan was okay (mostly) and everything had reset. Adam could still go to the future. Adam could still, maybe, have love.

“Thank fuck,” said Ronan. “I thought I was going to die in there.”

“I’m really glad you aren’t dead,” said Adam. 

They looked at each other, and it felt so magnetic, until Henry said, “Please if you’re going to kiss, wait until I’m not around.” They both looked away.

Noah came back with the wagon. By then, Adam had noticed that Ronan had rope burns and his wrists were bleeding. “Are there medical supplies at the hotel?” he asked as they bumped along the shore road.

When they got there, Henry dug through a supply closet and found some. 

“You don’t need to fuss over me,” said Ronan, but he was slumped against a wall, barely holding himself up. Adam just shot him a look—_don’t be ridiculous._

Adam thanked Noah and Henry over and over for their help before they went to bed, then he collected Ronan and took him upstairs (in the elevator—climbing was not possible at the moment). In Adam’s room, they sat on the bed, and Adam carefully cleaned and bandaged Ronan’s wrists and hands. 

He couldn’t meet Ronan’s eyes. He felt like crying again—out of relief or shame. Staring down at his blanket, he choked out the words, “I know my father did this. Ronan, I’m so sorry. I should have been more careful.”

“It’s not your fault,” said Ronan, voice low.

“It is a little.” Adam closed his eyes. _Don’t cry, don’t cry._

“Parrish… no.” Adam felt Ronan’s fingers slide into his where his hand was splayed on the bed. He looked up, finally. Ronan was looking at him with that familiar fervor, this time as if he was trying to alleviate Adam’s guilt just with his burning eyes.

It was time to be honest. “Ronan, you need to rest, but um, before you go, I have to tell you something.”

“Me too,” said Ronan, and he closed the space between them, and he kissed Adam.

It was a quick, hesitant kiss, one that asked for nothing, one that gave Adam the opportunity to say no. He was still registering it when Ronan pulled away. Adam pulled him right back in and kissed him with all the intensity of their strange, brief relationship, and the worry of the past few days, and the pent-up frustration of many years.

The sensation swept through him. This was a balm, and he hadn’t known how badly he needed it. Ronan held him tight around the waist and angled his head just so. Adam put his hands on the back of Ronan’s neck and tried to speak through kisses. _Thank you, I need this, I won’t let anyone hurt you again._

He made himself pull away after a minute. “Ronan—” the word came out like a sigh— “you need to rest.”

“Later,” said Ronan, coming in for another, but Adam laughed and held him off.

“No, now. I promise I’ll kiss you again tomorrow if you want.”

“Every day,” said Ronan.

“If you want.”

They sat staring at each other for a minute, then Ronan said, “I don’t have my key.”

“What?”

“My room key. I lost it at some point in the middle of being kidnapped.”

Adam winced at that, but… “Stay with me. I’d rather you did anyway.”

Ronan didn’t argue. He took off his dirt-stained clothes and lay down in Adam’s bed in only his underthings. Adam thought, _this is it, this is what’s going to kill me._ He was happily resigned to his fate.

When they were both in bed, Ronan whispered, “What did you need to tell me earlier?”

Adam smiled to himself. “Oh, it was something about wanting to kiss you.”

Ronan’s hand found his in the dark.

Adam slept much later than usual—but then, he’d been up until almost 3. The sun was high and streaming through his window, illuminating Ronan, who was still next to him.

Adam’s clearest thought was, _he needs to eat,_ so he slipped downstairs. It was past time for breakfast, but he found Henry in the kitchen and got some anyway. “Thank you again for last night,” Adam said.

“How’s the indomitable Ronan Lynch?” Henry asked.

“He’ll live.” Adam caught himself grinning, and Henry looked at him like he knew exactly what had happened last night.

“Oh, go back to your boy,” said Henry, practically pushing Adam out the door.

Upstairs, Ronan was awake. “Where’d you go?” he asked.

“Food,” said Adam, handing him a plate.

They ate silently. Adam could feel Ronan watching him, could feel the way he was holding himself tense. He wanted to ask why—or say anything, really. When he put down his plate and turned to face Ronan, he thought he might understand. There was a question in Ronan’s eyes—a question about last night.

So Adam said, “I think I promised you another kiss,” and Ronan smiled, and Adam kept his promise.

Ronan was still sitting there in just his underwear, so Adam asked to see his tattoo. He’d been thinking about it ever since the day they went swimming together. Ronan turned and let him look at it. It covered his whole back, and the longer Adam looked at it, the more things he saw, as if the tattoo was alive and changing. Feathers and scythes, stars and crosses. Adam traced them with his fingers and said the first thing that came to mind. _“Unguibus et rostro.”_

“You know Latin?” Ronan asked.

“Only a little,” said Adam. “I had to learn some for a role once.”

Ronan turned around, took Adam’s hand, put Adam’s fingers to his lips. Then he said, “The pocket watch has Latin on it. _Tempus edax rerum.”_ He saw Adam’s puzzled face and translated. “Time, the devourer of all things.”

“That’s ominous,” said Adam.

Ronan shrugged.

They got distracted for a few minutes with more kisses, and for the first time, Adam dared to run his hands along Ronan’s warm, smooth skin—shoulders, arms, stomach. It made Ronan shiver.

Then Adam remembered to ask, “How are you feeling today?”

He could see Ronan preparing to give him some flip answer, then changing his mind. “He hit me pretty hard,” said Ronan. “My head still hurts. I probably had a concussion.”

Adam tried not to think about his father hitting Ronan. “Maybe it’s better if you stay in bed today.”

And again, Ronan clearly wanted to argue but chose not to. “Will you stay with me?”

“Of course.”

They lay down again, and Ronan put his head on Adam’s chest, and they were quiet for a while. Eventually, they talked about going to the future.

“We shouldn’t go until you’re completely better,” said Adam. “I don’t want to risk it.”

“You were supposed to have two weeks of vacation anyway,” said Ronan. “You should take it. Going to the future is going to stress you the fuck out. So let’s stay two more weeks.”

“You aren’t tired of 1912 yet?” Adam asked.

Ronan shrugged and seemed to be working through something. Finally he said, “1912 is all right. You’re here.”

Around noon, Ronan got dressed and they went downstairs to officially check Ronan out of the hotel—he was going to stay in Adam’s room instead. Ronan paid his bill, and Adam arranged to have lunch and dinner sent upstairs.

Ronan had someone let him into his old room one last time to get his things. When he came back to Adam’s room, he showed him the time travel device and explained how it worked. Adam couldn’t believe how simple it was. “More emotion than science,” he noted.

“There’s a reason for that,” said Ronan, low, staring at the object in his hands.

“What’s that?” Adam asked, sliding closer to Ronan where they sat on the bed. He wanted to know more about what went on in that strange head.

“I’m not an inventor,” said Ronan. “I’m a dreamer.”

“You said you dreamed it,” Adam remembered.

“I meant that literally,” said Ronan.

“What—how?”

Ronan was quiet for a minute, still looking down. “I can take things out of my dreams. Like, if I’m holding something in my dream, sometimes when I wake up, I’m still holding it. It’s real, outside of my head.”

Adam lay down flat on his back and took a minute to process that.

“I know it sounds batshit,” said Ronan, almost apologetic, chewing on his bracelets.

“I suppose,” said Adam slowly, “that it’s not that much stranger than time travel or psychic visions. So, if I understand you, you took the time travel device out of your dreams?”

“I knew I needed to come back in time and find you. The only way I could think to do that was through dream magic. So the way the time travel works is stupid, because I’m not a scientist.”

“It’s not stupid,” said Adam.

“Do you believe me?”

“I guess so. I don’t think you’d lie to me.”

“I never lie,” said Ronan firmly. He lay down beside Adam and, after a moment, said “My father could do it too.”

“What—dream things?”

Ronan nodded. 

“So it’s genetic?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s fascinating,” said Adam. He looked over at the boy next to him, a bit awed. What amazing kind of creature was Ronan, anyway?

This was the first time he could remember Ronan mentioning his father. Adam took Ronan’s hand and said, “Tell me about your family? If you want to.”

Ronan was silent for a long time, so long that Adam regretted saying anything. But then, slowly— “I loved my father more than anything.” 

Once he started, he didn’t stop for a long time. He described an idyllic childhood in an enchanted kingdom called The Barns, with a clever, enigmatic father and a perfectly serene mother and two brothers who were his best friends. All of it had shattered the day he found his father dead in their driveway. Murdered—something to do with the dreaming and a shady business deal. After that, his mother went to sleep. “And she’s still sleeping,” said Ronan. He didn’t explain what that meant. He said all of that had caused a rift between him and his older brother, whom he had never mentioned to Adam without a note of contempt in his voice. The rift had never fully healed, he said.

Then he rolled over and looked at Adam and said, “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. With me.”

Adam took his hand. “You know my background. I think we match. Except that you’re more magical than I am.”

Ronan smiled one of his shark-smiles. Then he said, surprisingly tenderly, “You have your own kind of magic, Parrish.”

They were lost to the world; they didn’t leave the room again that day. When it was dark outside, and the only light came from the little lamp by their bed, Adam let Ronan undress him. Ronan ran careful hands all over him, lingering over some scars but not asking about them. He skated his fingers over Adam’s ribs and his collarbones, up and down his arms, and Adam ached, wanting more. He ached with the way that Ronan looked at him like he was something miraculous.

They kissed again, bare chests pressed together, Ronan’s hands buried in Adam’s hair. They abandoned themselves to each other for the rest of the night.

Adam woke up sometime around 3 in the morning because the room was bright. Dozens of what looked like fireflies were circling in the air over his head. He reached out to grab one, but there was nothing there, nothing material. He was confused for a moment, but then he remembered that he was sleeping next to a magic-maker. Ronan was dreaming of light.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He sat up fast, alarmed. “What the fuck,” he said. “How am I—why am I here?”
> 
> The other two just looked at him blankly. “You were gone,” said Blue. “You did the thing, and you disappeared. It’s been like, two minutes. Now you’re back, wearing—a nightgown?”

Ronan remembered what pure happiness felt like—he’d been purely, uncomplicatedly happy for most of his childhood.

Since his father’s death, he’d had a few happy moments—driving too fast at night, being with Gansey and Blue—but it was always tempered by the knowledge that his life had fallen to pieces.

Now, at least for a little while, he was back to pure happiness. He was in love, and he was spending every day with Adam. No rehearsals to interrupt things, no parents to try to separate them.

They spent hours in bed, talking and kissing and more than that.

They rowed to Assateague three times in a week. The first time, they took Noah and Henry, who had a day off. Ronan thanked them for helping find him, but he was ready to move on from that and never think about it again. Noah and Henry made fun of him as usual, laughing at the fact that he never let go of Adam’s hand and couldn’t stop looking at him with what they called “googly eyes.” But they privately told him that they were happy for him.

On their other two trips to Assateague, he and Adam were gloriously alone. They found their swimming hole from before and took a dip, and he reveled in the sight of Adam’s bare, brown skin in the sunlight. Adam wrapped his legs around Ronan’s waist and let Ronan taxi him around the pool. Ronan wanted to stay like that forever.

After, they lay under a tree, drying off, and ate the apples they’d brought with them, and talked.

“There’s a few people I need to write to before we go,” said Adam, offhand. “To say goodbye. Don’t let me forget.”

“Are you really okay with leaving everyone behind and not seeing them again?” Ronan asked. He hadn’t thought about that before.

“Mostly, yes,” said Adam. “I have friends in the theater and in the pictures, but no one I’m really close with. I never really have—” He didn’t finish that thought. “On the other hand, we could come back, couldn’t we? With your device? Just to visit.”

“Maybe,” said Ronan. “I wouldn’t want to do it too much. Could go wrong.”

“Mmm,” said Adam. He closed his eyes. He was even prettier than normal in the shade, with the sun filtering through the leaves and making patterns on his face. “What else have you made with your dream-magic? I’ve been wondering.”

Ronan wasn’t going to admit that he’d woken up to handfuls of peonies every day that week (they looked like the ones he’d given Adam on opening night) or that he’d woken up with a wallet-sized picture of Adam one morning (it looked like the one from the art gallery). He said, “So much shit, Parrish. I mean, when I was a kid it was what you’d imagine. Toys mainly.” And a brother—he wasn’t going to tell him that yet.

“And now that you’re older?”

“So many things come out, I don’t even know what they are sometimes. I dreamed a box that helps you translate languages. I dreamed a bird.”

“A bird?” Adam sat up a little, grinning.

“A raven. Her name is Chainsaw.”

Adam laughed.

He didn’t tell Adam about the night horrors, either. They hadn’t come in a while—not since he’d been in 1912. Maybe he’d been happier since then.

Lying back down and closing his eyes again, Adam said, “How does one take care of a raven? Did you keep her?”

“Fuck yeah, I did,” said Ronan. “What was I gonna do, release a dream-raven into the wild? She was just a baby.”

“So soft-hearted,” said Adam fondly.

“I am not,” said Ronan.

It was the second week of Adam’s vacation. Ronan was sleeping, soundly and contentedly, next to the boy he loved. And he was dreaming.

In the dream, he saw Adam in the library, like the day they met, only this time he looked lost and confused instead of happy. The scene shifted, and Ronan was sitting with Gansey and Blue in his bedroom at Declan’s house. It was the moment that he’d gone back in time.

Another shift. He was in the forest that often appeared in his dreams, and in front of him was another Ronan, wearing the pajamas that the real Ronan had borrowed from Adam. The other Ronan was holding the time travel device, and he slowly pushed the button three times.

Ronan woke up. He was in his bedroom at Declan’s house, and Gansey and Blue were there, staring at him curiously.

He was wearing Adam’s pajamas.

He sat up fast, alarmed. “What the fuck,” he said. “How am I—why am I here?”

The other two just looked at him blankly. “You were gone,” said Blue. “You did the thing, and you disappeared. It’s been like, two minutes. Now you’re back, wearing—a nightgown?”

“No, no, no.” Ronan thrashed around a bit on his bed, looking for the time travel device. It wasn’t there. How could he have come back without it? Could his dream self have sent him to the future with a dream version of it? It made no sense, but it was pretty clearly what had happened. _“Shit.”_

“What’s wrong? What happened?” Blue asked.

“Where did you go?” Gansey asked, with that gleam in his eye that he always got when something strange or magical happened.

“To 19-fucking-12, Dick, like I meant to,” Ronan snapped. “I wasn’t supposed to come back so soon. I wasn’t ready—” He buried his face in his hands, and he thought about Adam, waking up alone, not knowing where or why Ronan had gone.

Adam was smart. Maybe he would figure it out. That Ronan had gone back to the future. Maybe he would find the time device—if Ronan didn’t have it, surely it was still back there, in their room in the hotel. Adam knew how to use it. He could get here. Ronan knew he could—their first meeting was proof of it.

But Adam had found him at the wrong time. What if his second, third, fourth attempts were unsuccessful, too? What if Adam never found him? What if they never saw each other again?

Ronan collapsed onto his bed with a howl. He gave in to the pain.

Gansey and Blue slowly coaxed the story out of him. Making it to the past, finding Adam, hearing that Adam already knew he was coming. Making plans with him, going to the play, being filmed, battling Adam’s parents. Making friends with Henry and Noah—he realized, with another stab of pain, that he’d never see them again, either. Being kidnapped—Gansey and Blue were horrified at this, and Ronan tried to brush past it.

He told them that 1912 wasn’t really as strange as he’d thought it would be. Everyone had talked pretty normally. He hadn’t minded the clothes. He had missed driving, but there wasn’t really anywhere to drive to on Chincoteague, anyway. He’d been fascinated by the old cars Noah had shown him in the garage, by the way the inside of them was different from the cars he knew.

It was hard to talk about the other part—his feelings. The way Adam had mesmerized him from the first moment. The things that had happened in the past week and a half. The magic of being with him.

Gansey and Blue knew him well enough, though. He saw them exchanging glances at the careful way he said Adam’s name. He saw their raised eyebrows when he talked about how much time he’d spent with Adam. When he stopped talking, Blue said, “Adam sounds very special.” She said it in her diplomatic, trying-not-to-piss-off-Ronan voice. He hated that voice.

So he glared at her. “He is fucking special.”

They looked at each other again, and Ronan wanted to throw something.

“Did you, ah—” Gansey was using his I’m-trying-to-be-delicate voice— “possibly have more than friendly feelings for him?”

Ronan fought the urge to say something snarky, something along the lines of _none of your business, Dick_ or _I don’t have feelings._

He understood their curiosity. Ronan didn’t really do “more than friendly” feelings. Well, he’d had a tiny crush on Gansey when they’d first met. There’d been one boy at Aglionby, freshman year, who Ronan had liked to look at, before he realized the boy was a giant prick. There was a guy who had studied in the library a lot when Ronan had first started working there. Ronan had liked looking at him, too, but then he’d stopped coming.

There had never been anything like what he felt for Adam. There couldn’t have been, he thought. It was all or nothing with Ronan. Adam had all of him, maybe forever.

Gansey and Blue didn’t know about any of those almost-crushes. In their minds, he was probably a robot who never thought about romance at all.

He had waited too long to answer. Gansey had a knowing look on his face, and Blue looked sympathetic.

“Shit,” Ronan said very softly. “Yeah.”

Blue threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, Ronan. I’m sorry, but I’m also happy for you! This is a big deal!”

“I don’t want it to be a big deal,” he said.

“This is new for you, though,” she said, muffled, face on his shoulder.

“It is,” he admitted.

“I thought maybe,” she said. “Maybe that’s why all this was happening. It just made sense.”

“Does it even fucking matter?” he asked, pulling away. “I might never even see him again. This wasn’t the plan—I thought I’d come back here on my own terms, and he and I would have a plan to meet—but we don’t.”

“Does he have the time travel device?” Gansey asked. “Since you don’t?”

“I think so,” said Ronan. “I don’t know.”

“Does he have feelings for you too?”

“Yes.” Ronan closed his eyes and thought about the way Adam looked at him, fond and desirous.

“Then he’ll find you,” said Gansey confidently.

“Because it matters to him, too,” said Blue. She’d grabbed Ronan’s hand after he’d ended their hug. She squeezed it now.

“Maybe,” said Ronan. He wasn’t so sure.

He spent the next day in bed. He had barely slept the night before. He slept a little during the day, but then the night horrors came for the first time in weeks. He jolted awake just before they caught him. After that, he made sure not to fall asleep again. Still, he didn’t move all day, not until Declan came home from work and barged into his room and said, “Why are you still in bed?”

“Fuck off,” said Ronan.

“Come downstairs and eat something,” said Declan.

Ronan did. Only because he was hungry.

The next day, he was supposed to work. He thought about calling in sick, but he changed his mind, because the library was where Adam had found him before. It was where Adam might find him again.

But he didn’t come that day. Or the next. Or the next. Or…

* * *

Adam had woken up very early on Wednesday, about four days before he and Ronan planned to go to the future. Ronan was sleeping beside him, snoring softly, and when Adam couldn’t go back to sleep, he watched Ronan instead, enjoying how peaceful he looked.

He was still watching when Ronan slowly faded away beside him. His spot in the bed was suddenly empty.

Adam had leapt out of bed in a panic, touching the place where Ronan had been and saying his name over and over. Like maybe he was still there. Just hiding. Maybe he was about to pop out from under the bed and say it had all been a joke.

But the minutes passed, and Ronan didn’t reappear. Adam had sat on their bed, in shock, and tried to piece together what had happened. Ronan had gone back to his own time. That was the only possible explanation, surely.

And yet… The time travel device he had dreamed was sitting in the drawer of their bedside table. How could he have gone back without it?

Ronan had confessed to him, only the night before, that sometimes he dreamed of monsters, half-bird, half-man, who seemed to hate him more than anything, who came to his dreams just to destroy him. One of them had almost killed him once, he’d said. Adam had thought of Ronan saying _you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into with me._ He wondered if Ronan was warning him by telling him about the dream monsters. Saying, _get out now._

Adam wasn’t going to do that, so he’d just kissed Ronan in reply.

Now, he was sitting in the empty bed wondering if Ronan had disappeared because something in his dream had hurt him. Adam had no idea how that worked.

He stayed at the hotel for a few more days, like he’d planned. He hoped Ronan would come back—if he’d gone back to the future, surely it had been an accident. But Ronan didn’t come. 

He spent a lot of time staring at Ronan’s time travel device. He’d known that eventually he would have to use it on his own. Ronan had said he would dream a second one for Adam. That hadn’t happened, but he still had the original. Now, alone, the idea of using it was a little terrifying.

Friday night, though, he finally got up the courage. Even though it was summer, he put on his coat and stuffed the pockets with things he didn’t want to leave behind. He closed his eyes and thought of Ronan. And he pushed the button three times.

He didn’t feel anything. He didn’t hear anything. He didn’t seem to have moved.

He opened his eyes and was still in his hotel room.

On Saturday, he left Chincoteague. He had weighed the chances that Ronan might try to find him there against the fact that his father was coming back to get him. Adam wanted to avoid his father at all costs. He had dropped a letter in the mail a few days earlier to say that he’d be going to New York as discussed, no need to accompany him. But in case his father didn’t believe it, Adam planned to leave before he arrived.

But he wasn’t going to New York. Not right away, anyway. He was going to Henrietta—he would make sure his parents didn’t find out—and he was going to see the psychic woman who’d once predicted his future and ask her what to do.

When he packed, he packed Ronan’s things too. He couldn’t bear to leave them behind. There wasn’t much anyway—Ronan’s clothes and a bit of money and a small picture of Adam that must have come from his dreams, because where else would he have gotten it? It was a little comforting, at least, to know that Ronan had dreamed of him.

Before he left, he went to see Noah and Henry one last time. They asked where Ronan was. Adam said he’d gone ahead, to find them a place to stay in New York. He promised they would write. He felt a little bad for lying.

It took most of the day to cross the state, so Adam arrived in Henrietta late at night and slept in the tiny train station. In the morning, he went to Fox Way, a little side street with a house full of psychic women. Persephone met him at the door. Instead of hello, she said, “You could have slept here.”

She took him inside and sat him down and gave him a piece of cherry pie. She didn’t pull out her tarot cards like usual. She looked at him and said, “You’re going to the future.”

“Yes.”

“Remind me what year?”

“2015,” he said.

“That’s where your lover is?”

Adam closed his eyes briefly, picturing him. “Yes.”

“Your visions haven’t shown you how to get there?” she asked.

“I haven’t had any visions since I met him.” Adam picked at the pie.

Persephone kept looking at him with her calm black eyes that seemed to perpetually be seeing things he couldn’t. Dreamily, she said, “Time is such a tricky thing. Do you remember when you saw the forest?”

He did remember. Two years ago, Persephone had taught him how to scry. He’d stared into deep water and found himself in another world—a dark forest with ancient trees.

“That’s his place,” said Persephone. “He’s a creator, isn’t he? He dreamed the forest. Look for him there.”

He showed her the time device. “This is how he traveled through time, but it isn’t working for me.”

She examined it for a long time and said, “This is his dream magic. I’ve never seen anything like it.” She got that far-off look again. “You can’t get to him because you’ve only known him here. In this time. You can’t imagine the future.”

“What am I supposed to do about that?” he asked, feeling desperate.

“Scry,” she said. “Find the forest. Go through it. You’ll be able to see him, if not speak to him, in his own time.”

Adam stayed with Persephone for a few days and attempted to do what she’d said. It took him a few tries to even find the forest. When he did, Ronan wasn’t there. Adam wasn’t sure what to look for. Why was he even there? Ronan didn’t live in a forest. He lived in Washington. 

Persephone had said to go _through_ the forest. He wandered for what felt like hours, and he never reached the end of it. He had to pull himself back to reality before he wandered too far.

He tried again later that day. This time he walked in a different direction and came to a place where the trees gave way to empty space. He kept walking, and the blank space turned into a room. A room full of metal shelves filled with books.

Ronan worked in a library; he’d mentioned it once. Adam had thought that seemed a little incongruous with his personality. His pulse quickened as he moved in between the shelves. He reached the front of the library, where several people stood behind a long desk.

One was Ronan. He was looking down, doing something with a pile of books. Adam approached him slowly. Persephone had said that Ronan wouldn’t be able to see or hear him, but Adam hoped that for once, she was wrong.

Ronan glanced up and looked right through him. Went back to work.

Adam acknowledged the pang he felt at that, then put it aside. He took a moment just to breathe and look at Ronan’s starkly lovely face. Those sharp lines. Those long eyelashes hiding blue eyes. He remembered what it felt like to kiss those lips, to run his hands over that shaved head. It had been less than a week since they’d been together, but it felt like so much longer.

Adam pulled himself back to his real purpose—to memorize this room. The layout, and all the strange, unknown objects, and the odd clothes the people wore. And to memorize what Ronan looked like here. When he felt like he’d looked at all of it enough, he pulled himself back to reality. 1912, Fox Way. He was kneeling on the floor of Persephone’s room, still hunched over a metal bowl filled with water.

He took the afternoon to write a few letters, including one to his parents that included a wad of money. He asked Persephone to send the letters if he didn’t come back.

That night, he went to the future. He closed his eyes and pictured Ronan just as he’d seen him in the library. He pushed the button three times.

He opened his eyes. He was on a street, busy with what he assumed were cars, though they looked nothing like any cars he’d ever seen. In front of him was building made of brick and glass, with a sign that said Cleveland Park Library.

Adam took a long, shaky breath and walked inside. He was coming from a different direction than before, and it took him a moment to orient himself. There was the desk. There was Ronan, like before, stacking books on a cart. This time, when he looked up, he saw Adam. His expression was one of noticing but not really reacting.

_He’s surprised,_ thought Adam. He could feel the gigantic smile cracking his face. He rushed over and grabbed both of Ronan’s hands, carried away by happiness.

“Here you are!” he said. “I was so afraid I wouldn’t be able to find you.”

Ronan just looked at him blankly, which Adam ignored. 

“Hi,” he said. “I don’t know how long it’s been for you, but god, I’ve missed you so much. Ronan—” He couldn’t help laughing. “Are you surprised? You look so shocked.”

Ronan said, “Uh, I don’t—”

“Know what to say? Me neither.” Adam leaned in closer, wishing there was no desk between them, wishing Ronan wasn’t at work so they could kiss as much as they wanted. He squeezed Ronan’s hands and said, “It’s all right. I’m here now. I’ll stay, if you’ll have me. Just say we can work it out, please.”

Ronan stared at him, like he was thinking hard. Adam began to feel a little uncomfortable. Was Ronan not happy to see him?

Then Ronan said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Adam let go of his hands. “You don’t?”

“No,” said Ronan.

Something began to dawn on Adam. “Have you seen me before? Do you know my name?” He waited for the answer, agonized.

“No.”

Adam felt it like a physical blow. He had to look away to compose himself. He wasn’t going to cry in a busy library. He wasn’t going to cry in front of a Ronan who didn’t know him. “This is the wrong time,” he said. “I’d forgotten.” How could he have forgotten what Ronan had told him when they’d first met? That Ronan had met Adam in the library. That Adam had known him but Ronan hadn’t. “I’ll have to try again,” he said. The thought was demoralizing when he’d already been trying so hard all week. He’d thought this was it. He’d thought he’d succeeded. He turned back to Ronan and asked again, just in case, “You’re _sure_ you don’t know me?” 

“I’m sure,” said Ronan. “Sorry.” 

He didn’t sound especially sorry. But why would he care?

“I got it wrong, then,” said Adam. One of the things he had stuffed in his pockets—things he didn’t want to leave behind—was the pocket watch Ronan had given him. He remembered now that he was supposed to give it back. It was hard to part with it. He wanted a memento, in case they never saw each other again, but he knew what he had to do. He handed it to Ronan and said, “Keep this, so you can give it to me later. I’ll see you soon, I hope.” He took one last good look at Ronan and then walked away.

Outside, he walked for a while. He didn’t let himself cry until he was far away from the library. He mostly blocked out everything around him. He was in no state to process a new century. He tried to think what to do next. Should he try to hop farther into the future? If picturing Ronan at the library hadn’t worked the first time, would it work the second time? Was he better off going back and asking for more help from Persephone?

That was what he did, in the end. She wasn’t surprised that his mission had failed, which annoyed him. Couldn’t she have warned him? She also wasn’t very helpful about what to do next. She said he had three choices—try the same thing again and hope it worked the second time, scry again and see if he could find Ronan anywhere besides the library, or forget about Ronan and proceed with his life in 1912.

The third choice was impossible. However, Adam was not made of money. His parents had taken more than their usual percentage of his Chincoteague paycheck, seeing as they knew the owner and he’d passed the check straight to them. If getting to Ronan took more than, say, another week or so, Adam would be in some trouble. He didn’t want to take advantage of Persephone’s hospitality anymore. He was going to have to go back to New York.

In New York, Adam lived with a couple of other Biograph actors. He’d meant to write to them too, to say he wasn’t coming back. Thank goodness he hadn’t. He arrived at Grand Central late at night, two days after his disastrous trip to the future, and headed downtown to Greenwich Village. That was where a lot of artists lived, and Adam had worked in a lot of the little, alternative theaters in the area. It was also, crucially, within walking distance of Biograph, if a person didn’t mind long walks.

The small apartment was empty when he came in. His room looked so dark and lonely compared to his sunny room in Chincoteague. He sighed and set about unpacking. He left Ronan’s things in the suitcase so he wouldn’t have to look at them.

The next few days went like this: he skried. He failed to see Ronan anywhere but in the library. Sometimes he couldn’t even manage that. Frustrated, he hid his scrying bowl and the time device under his bed until he could bear to try again.

His roommates were perturbed at the amount of time he was spending in his room. They tried to convince him to go out with them. He went once or twice to appease them. They had clearly noticed that he was different from before, and when they tried to ask about it, he always changed the subject.

He went to the Broadway director who’d offered him a role and discovered that the part had been given to someone else because Adam had waited too long to accept it.

He went to Biograph, and they immediately put him into their latest comedy. So he was back to doing what he knew best. His friends there were happy to see him, and he couldn’t muster the same enthusiasm. People at Biograph talked about being a “family,” but Adam, with his unhappy concept of family, had never really felt like a part of it. Now he felt less connected than ever.

_I am unknowable,_ he thought. Except—maybe he hadn’t been with Ronan.

After a few weeks, he decided to put aside his attempts to go to the future for the time being. It was starting to seem impossible. He’d tried once more to go to the library and had instead ended up standing in front of a barn full of sleeping cows. He hadn’t known where or what time he was in, but in any case, there’d been no sign of Ronan there.

It was August, and he was sitting inside the Biograph studio on an unbearably hot day. He was waiting for his scenes in yet another one-reeler, this one a family drama with a lot of weeping. It was his last day of work on this one. His greasepaint was melting off in the heat, and Billy Bitzer laughed at him as he passed by. “You’re a sight. Better have someone fix you up before your scene.”

Adam was too tired to move. It had already been a long day of work. He struggled to keep his eyes open as he watched the actresses playing his mother and sister gesticulate wildly about his impending death.

Then he had a sudden, sharp pain at his temple. This woke him up immediately. He knew what this was. It always happened when he was about to have a vision.

The film set was noisy as usual—music playing from a tinny gramophone, the director shouting instructions to the actors, the camera ticking away as the crank turned, people talking and hammering behind the scenes. It didn’t matter—the camera didn’t pick up any of it.

Slowly, all that sound faded away. All the people and equipment around Adam faded into blinding whiteness. Then this emptiness resolved itself into shapes. A bed. A dresser. A boy, crouched on the floor, his head in his hands.

It was Ronan. He was crying. _“Adam, Adam,”_ he said.

Adam walked closer to him and put one hand on his back, wanting to comfort him. Of course, Ronan couldn’t feel it. It was heart-wrenching to watch him cry and not be able to do anything about it.

But this vision had a purpose. Adam realized that he was in Ronan’s bedroom. A place where he spent a lot of time, surely. This vision was showing him another place to find Ronan, a version of Ronan who definitely knew him.

Adam stood and memorized the room—the white walls and the piles of clothes on the floor and the birdcage in one corner. And so on.

“I’m coming,” he said to Ronan, who couldn’t hear him.

The room and the boy faded away. Adam was back on a film set in 1912, and Billy Bitzer was saying to him, “We’re ready for you.”

Adam filmed his death scene in a sort of stupor. The director complimented him on his “stoic resignation,” which was really his glassy-eyed, post-vision haze. As soon as he was allowed to leave, he did, practically sprinting back to Greenwich Village. He was going to get to Ronan this time. He felt hopeful for the first time in weeks.

Once again, he prepared all his goodbye letters. He wrote a few more—to Noah, to Henry, and to his roommates, with next month’s rent money tucked inside and a postscript asking them to mail the other letters.

Then he did what he had done before— put on his coat, despite the heat. Stuffed his pockets. Stood by his window, the time device in hand. Closed his eyes. Pictured Ronan—on the floor in that unfamiliar bedroom. And he pushed the button three times.

When he opened his eyes, he was in the room from the vision. Now he was standing by Ronan’s window. Ronan was no longer on the floor, but sitting on his bed, with his back to Adam.

There was nothing to do but say— “Hello.”

Ronan jumped dramatically, startled. He turned around and stared. “Adam? Is that you? What the fuck is wrong with your face?”

Adam laughed, because it was such a Ronan question and also because he’d forgotten he was wearing half-melted greasepaint. “Don’t worry, it’s makeup,” he said. He stepped a little closer.

Ronan said, “You scared the shit out of me.”

“Sorry.” Adam was smiling helplessly like he had in the library. “Are you glad to see me, at least?”

“Are you real?” asked Ronan.

“I think so,” said Adam.

“I always thought I knew when I was awake and when I was asleep—"

Adam walked around the bed to stand in front of Ronan and take his hand. “You’re awake. Unless we’re having the same dream.”

“Possible,” said Ronan.

“Do I feel real to you?” Adam asked.

Ronan answered by pulling Adam down on to his lap and burying his face in Adam’s neck. “I’m not kissing you with that weird makeup on,” he said. 

“Fair enough.”

“You better take it off later so I can.” And then, quieter, “I thought I’d never see you again.”

“How long has it been?” Adam murmured, rubbing Ronan’s shaved head.

“A month, I guess.”

“For me too,” said Adam. “I’ve been trying so hard to get to you. It just took me a while to find the right place and time.”

“I thought you’d come to the library,” said Ronan.

“I did—you didn’t know me.”

“I remember.”

“I’d forgotten,” said Adam. “You warned me.”

“How did you find me this time? How did you even know I was gone in the first place?” Ronan was still murmuring into Adam’s neck.

Adam held onto him tighter. “I had a vision today that showed you here, in this room. And I knew you were gone because I saw you disappear—I was awake when it happened—you were in bed with me, and then you just kind of… dissolved.”

Ronan shivered. “I don’t understand how it happened. It was like one of my dreams summoned me back here. I didn’t know that was possible—I didn’t want to go.”

“Who’s to say what’s possible anymore. Let’s just hope it doesn’t happen again.”

Ronan asked quietly, “Are you staying?”

“Am I staying?” Adam leaned away to look at him properly. “Am I doing the only thing in the world I want to do? Of course I’m staying, if you’ll have me.”

“I’ll have you,” said Ronan, gruff. Then he gently pushed Adam off his lap, took him by the hand, and led him to another room. It had to be a lavatory, but it looked nothing like any lavatory Adam had seen before. For one thing, there was a large glass cell where he’d expect a bathtub.

Ronan took a wet cloth to Adam’s face and rubbed gently. He was frowning like it was the most important thing he’d ever done, and he really needed to get it right. After a minute— “It’s not coming off very well.”

“Greasepaint is like that,” said Adam.

They finally got most of it off with a combination of scrubbing and a bit of lotion. At some point in the process, Ronan asked, “Why the fuck did you have to wear all this shit?”

“To look good on camera.”

“And fucking terrifying in real life, apparently. I thought you were a poltergeist.”

“But how did I look on screen?” Adam asked, leaning in and trying to look at least a little seductive. “You said you’ve seen some of my pictures.”

Ronan rolled his eyes, but he said, “You look stupidly beautiful all the time.” And then, finally, kissed him.

Adam’s back was pressed against the hard marble of the sink, but the kiss was so very soft. Ronan was holding onto him like he was something delicate and precious. Then he took Adam back to his room and kissed him some more, kissed like he could never get enough of it. Adam was very amenable to the idea of never stopping.

Eventually, though, they did stop, and Ronan pressed his forehead to Adam’s and said, in an I’ve-just-been-kissed kind of voice, “I’m not very good with practical shit. But my mind’s racing right now, trying to figure out how all this is going to work.”

Adam’s heart sank. Maybe Ronan was about to say that it wouldn’t work at all. That Adam should just go back.

But he said, “You can stay here. Or we can go to The Barns. Declan can’t really object to me living there if I’m not alone. I’ll have to explain where you came from—but weirder things have happened in my family. It’ll be okay.”

Adam smiled. His heart felt safe again. He tried to remember what Ronan had said about his family. “Declan is your brother?” Ronan nodded. “And The Barns is your farm?” Another nod.

Then Ronan went on— “We need to get you some clothes. We’ll just go online and load up. Whatever you like. You can wear my shit until yours comes. And I’m gonna have to dream you a birth certificate and a Social Security number. And whether you like it or not, I’m gonna teach you how to drive stick.”

Adam vividly remembered the conversation where he’d told Ronan that he couldn’t drive, and Ronan’s absolute indignation. However. “I don’t know what half of that means.”

“It’s okay, Parrish. I’ll take care of all of it.”

Adam bristled a little—because he’d always taken care of himself, and he didn’t like handing the reins off to someone else.

Ronan, who’d been watching him carefully whenever they weren’t kissing, noticed. “I just mean—you aren’t alone anymore.”

_Not alone_ was a wild concept, a little bit hard to grasp. He closed his eyes and tried to picture a life with Ronan. He realized he’d never really thought past the immediate future of their relationship. He pictured navigating a new century with someone by his side to explain it all. He pictured life on a farm. He pictured going back to school, finding work. He pictured a child, maybe, and old age.

He thought about Ronan’s lost parents and his nightmares. He thought about a month of separation, and Ronan kneeling on the floor, crying for him. He thought about their sunny days in Chincoteague, the ease of it, the comfort.

“Neither are you,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please excuse me for this VERY fluffy ending.
> 
> [If you want to try to imagine Adam in greasepaint.](https://silentology.wordpress.com/2016/02/22/silent-film-makeup-what-was-it-really-like/)
> 
> No Pynch time-travel fic will ever be as good as [ The Time It Takes (To Believe In Fate)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12243993/chapters/27819693), so if you haven’t read that one, you should! 
> 
> Thanks so much for your feedback!

**Author's Note:**

> “Time is the longest distance between two places.” – Tennessee Williams
> 
> I'm [magicienetreveur](https://magicienetreveur.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr if you want to chat!


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